Vernon and Irene Castle's Ragtime Revolution »

Vernon and Irene Castle popularized ragtime dancing in the years just before World War I and made dancing a respectable pastime in America. The whisper-thin, elegant Castles were trendsetters in many ways: they traveled with a black orchestra, had an openly lesbian manager, and were animal-rights advocates decades before it became a public issue. Irene was also a fashion innovator, bobbing her hair ten years before the flapper look of the 1920s became popular. From their marriage in 1911 until 1916, the Castles were the most famous and influential dance team in the world. Their dancing schools and nightclubs were packed with society figures and white-collar workers alike. After their peak of white-hot fame, Vernon enlisted in the Royal Canadian Flying Corps, served at the front lines, and was killed in a 1918 airplane crash. Irene became a movie star and appeared in more than a dozen films between 1917 and 1922. The Castles were depicted in the Fred Astaire—Ginger Rogers movie The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle (1939), but the film omitted most of the interesting and controversial aspects of their lives. They were more complex than posterity would have it: Vernon was charming but irresponsible, Irene was strong-minded but self-centered, and the couple had filed for divorce before Vernon's death (information that has never before been made public). Vernon and Irene Castle's Ragtime Revolution is the fascinating story of a couple who reinvented dance and its place in twentieth-century culture.

Joan Stahl - Library Journal

In the years before World War I, Vernon and Irene Castle launched a dance revolution. Golden (Anna Held and the Birth of Ziegfeld's Broadway) chronicles their break from tradition as they danced to lively ragtime music in fashionable settings, traveled with a black orchestra, and created such dances as the Castle walk and the Castle polka. Impeccably dressed, thin, and elegant, they were glamorous trendsetters, particularly Irene, whose innovations included bobbed hair, headbands, and little Dutch bonnets. They opened dance schools and nightclubs for those who did not feel comfortable in public dance halls and beer gardens, and in doing so, they made dancing socially acceptable. With Vernon's untimely death in 1918, the Castle phenomenon began to wane, but their legend lived on in The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle(1939) starring Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire and through Irene's reminiscences in her books My Husband(1919) and Castles in the Air(1958). Golden, author of four other biographies, has done a commendable job separating fact from fiction. Recommended for dance collections in public and academic libraries.