Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #167512 in Books
• Published on: 2006-02-02
• Binding: Paperback
• 288 pages

Synopsis
Welcome to America at the turn of the twentieth century, where the rhythms of ragtime set the beat. Harry Houdini astonishes audiences with magical feats of escape, the mighty J. P. Morgan dominates the financial world and Henry Ford manufactures cars by making men into machines. Emma Goldman preaches free love and feminism, while ex-chorus girl Evelyn Nesbitt inspires a mad millionaire to murder the architect Stanford White. In this stunningly original chronicle of an age, such real-life characters intermingle with three remarkable families, one black, one Jewish, and one prosperous WASP, to create a dazzling literary mosaic that brings to life an era of dire poverty, fabulous wealth, and incredible change in short, the era of ragtime.

Customer Reviews

Deeply moving - and intellectually rewarding too.
Doctorow digs into the unlovely truths behind our cosy received notions of the past - and blows them up in our faces. A salutary historical lesson, but told with such human warmth and meticulously imagined scenarios that, rather than despair, the reader feels a strange optimism: that we must, and can, do better next time. And Doctorow makes sure that we know there will be a next time; the intricate links between our past and our present are his great theme. Doctorow loves humanity and hates oppression - and portrays both with such immediacy that you laugh and cry along with him. A lovely man with a deep passion for humanity. Read this book!

Ragtime- a students review
Ragtime is a cleverly formed masterpeice of interwoven narrative threads that interact and weave in and away from each other with fluency and unprediction. The main authorial concerns found in the book are the numerous subtle steps that form into a leap of change found in the historical, cultural and social elements of the time. Things such as discrimination, sexual attitude and the contrast between three seemingly contradictory families and the battles they each face, paints this major idea of change within the book. Without any major signs of the authors posonal viwes, values and contexts of the time, leaves the essence of the book largely untainted and relatively unbias. An excellent read.

Doctorow's Best
This is the modern day eqivalent of John Dos Passos' USA Trilogy. The vignettes Doctorow draws for us have a great deal in common, with Dos Passos' "I am a camera" snapshots. Doctorow depicts an era that is generally regarded in the American historical consciousness as being primarily bucolic and carefree. The nation, relatively innocent, having shaken off the aftereffects of the civil war, has recently won the spurious Spanish-American war, and is generally revelling in a sense of purpose and civility.

What Doctorow is suggesting is that this serene surface was already infected, with a host of social ills festering beneath it. A shift was occuring that would lead to labor riots, race riots, change in mores (sexual attitudes), loss of faith in institutions, etc. that would define the 20th century. If this were all of Doctorow's plan however, it would have been interesting Sociology, but a pretty boring novel.

Doctorow is above all an interesting storyteller. He knows how to keep a plot moving and how to invest it with enough intellectual hardware to make the reader feel that his/her time has been worth the effort. He can bring a scene to life with a few fresh (never shopworn) details. He doesn't spend a great deal of time elabortaing over these details, as James or Wolfe do, but he makes the reader just as cognizant of them. A few brushstrokes and we are there. His writing is cinematic, in that we can "see" the scene he is depicting, without burdening us with excess verbiage. This is the hallmark of a really good author. Ragtime is a primary example of this kind of shorthand acumen. The novel flashes by as seen in a kinescope. I, for one, was delighted I had inserted my nickle.