TEENAGE: The Creation of Youth 1875-1945

Rolling Stone magazine said: 'Teenage is the definitive history of youth in revolt, from the gaslit age to the dawn of rock. Jon Savage captures the hell and adventure of adolescence with stunning detail and the thrilling force of the first Ramones album.' With connections, observations and excellent footnotes, Savage lavishly documents the sudden empowerment of youth culture blending his wit and scholarship and appreciative eye for the subversive to any topic he approaches. Ringing with music from ragtime to swing, he roams London, New York, Paris and Berlin with hooligans and Apaches; explores free love and eternal youth; meets flappers and zoot-suiters, the Bright Young People and the Lost Generation. He fuses popular culture, politics and social history into one stunning chronical of modern life and the cultural and psychological phenomenon of adolescent rebellion which reinvented societies and predated Elvis by at least 100 years. He puts into perspective today's 'adolescent issues' and how the rest of us respond and should respond to them. His material documents the moral panic, romantic myths, literary fantasies as Savage jumps confidently across disciplines and continents and culture in Britain, America, Germany and France. He 'cunningly tracks the tortured team from Young Werther, Dorian Gray and Peter Pan to Rupert Brooke, Dada and Jitterbugs, handily proving that there were many, many rebels before James Dean. He also imparts a deep sense of horror and outrage at how over a century of complacent establishment routinely sent and sends the youth out to die.' - Mark O'Donnell. Magnificent Faber paperback, 549pp, illus.