"A New York Times" journalist discovers a discarded old diary - a long-lost treasure that introduces her to an extraordinary woman and a glamourous, forgotten time. For decades it languished in an unclaimed trunk in the basement of a prewar building on Manhattan's Upper West Side, until it was tossed in a dumpster and recovered by journalist Lily Koppel. As she opened the diary's worn leather-bound cover, Koppel had no idea that she was about to embark on a wondrous journey back in time, to a lost New York in which women of privilege met for tea at Schrafft's, danced at the Hotel Pennsylvania, and toasted the night at El Morocco.Nor did she expect to be captivated by a headstrong and beautiful young woman who loved to play the piano, paint portraits and write poetry. Compelled by the hopes and dreams, drama and heartbreak captured in the diary's pages, Koppel set out to find it's original owner, the words, 'This book belongs to Florence Wolfson' the only clue. One day, a chance call by a private investigator leads Koppel to Wolfson, now 90 years old, living in Connecticut with her husband of 67 years. Wolfson is mesmerized by how well the diary had been preserved and the life she had almost forgotten filled with art, theater, salons and many lovers (chief among them Eva Le Gallienne and the son of an Italian count, Filippo Canaletti Gaudenti Da Sirola).

Customer Rating:
Summary: Fun to read
Comment: Fun to read, made more so because it really happened. Wanted to go dumpster diving. Wanted to be that articulate and thoughtful when I was 14 years old!!

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Flawless wonderful book never to be forgotten!
Comment: This is the most incredible book. I couldn't put it down. It is like a time machine, a glimpse into the past. One of the most skillfully written and researched books I have ever read. Buy a copy for you and give another as a gift to a friend! I have just finished the book and can't wait to read it again. THANK YOU MS. KOPPEL. This is the most rewarding fascinating book.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Don't waste your money!
Comment: I thought this book would be Florence's complete diary verbatim. Actually it is her biography as told by Lily Koppel, with little snippets of the diary here and there. I found the book boring and am sorry I ever wasted the money for it.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Interesting, unrealized
Comment: Florence Wolfson was a brilliant and ambitious teenager with artistic aspirations, and one wishes in retrospect that family friend Francis had given her a one-year diary instead of the five-year kind that allows for only a few sentences each day. Truly, I would rather have had a more complete picture of any one year than settle for the mere fragments of personality inherent in the restricted five-year format.

This biography was also curious: there would be excerpts from the diary, then explanation of the context. If it had been reversed, with context first, the diary entries would have made more sense. I imagine biographer Lily Koppel wanted the reader to share her puzzlement, but it weakened the flow of the narrative.

Koppel unfortunately doesn't have enough material to flesh out the cryptic and minimal notes in the five-year diary, so she resorts to lists of places, descriptions of vanished venues, product names, and cultural references. Koppel obviously loves the era and researched it thoroughly, but she wasn't successful at weaving all that research into an interesting story. Perhaps the simplistic writing (eighth-grade level, perhaps?) also contributed to the unrealized potential. It's also likely that years of training as a journalist have squashed her natural style, which I hope she can recover in subsequent efforts. Sadly, without an index, interesting references also become lost in the sheer mass of data.

But if the reader gets fed up, skip to the final two chapters - the engrossing story of how Koppel fortuitously tracks down the still-living Florence. Once Koppel's own story begins to emerge, the writing and the story become nuanced and more complex.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Told like a reporter
Comment: While the premise intrigued me, I gave up reading 1/3 way along. At first the pictures and time period held my interest, but the writing felt more like newspaper reporting than storytelling and I never became invested in the persona of Florence Wolfson.

This impetuous, strong-minded and creative young woman should have been an evocative character, but her exploits were chronicled with a distant and cool hand that left her sounding spoiled and foolish to me. The prose had less life than the brief entries in the diary. I couldn't help thinking that the cold home life alluded to here and there and such events as the house burning down would have had a dramatic effect on an emotional, imaginative girl, yet nothing is made of it at all. We're told Florence wanted to go to school the day after the fire to report the event--only for the dramatic shock effect! Wasn't it rather a plea for attention and/or comfort that was apparently not forthcoming from her parents? This should have been developed (and plenty of other things) to show a sympathetic and multidimensional person who was coping with an intense and complicated situation. The girl who wrote in that diary wasn't a cardboard figure, yet she is made to seem one in the narrative.

Perhaps my expectations for this book were wrong. I thought that based on the diary's entries, a story would be woven that made a young girl and 1930's New York come alive. The author did a fine job of reporting the facts (just the facts, M'am) and there were plenty of them--great research--but no emotion. Considering how dramatic Florence was, it almost seemed silly to report her life like battles in a war. Perhaps things changed further along; I can't say. And again, maybe my expectations were in error and the book was intended to be an accurate chronicle of the facts, but it didn't hold my interest.

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