<div><div>&quot;Cuddles Houlihan got clipped by the vodka bottle as it exited the pneumatic tube. . . .&quot; With that bottle we enter Bandbox, a hugely successful magazine of the 1920s, run by bombastic Jehoshaphat &quot;Joe&quot; Harris. Harris's most ambitious protégé (&quot;the bastard son he never had&quot;) has just defected to run the competition, plunging Bandbox into a newsstand death struggle. The magazine's fight for survival will soon involve a sabotaged fiction contest, the vice squad, a subscriber's kidnapping, and a film-actress cover subject who makes the heroines of Chicago look like the girls next door. While Harris and his magazine careen from comic crisis to make-or-break calamity, the reader races from skyscraper to speakeasy.<br><br>Thomas Mallon has given us a madcap romp of a book that brilliantly portrays Manhattan in the gaudiest American decade of them all.<br><br></div></div>