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History. Sociology. Nonfiction. HTML:A Chicago Tribune Noteworthy Book A GoodReads Reader's Choice In One Summer Bill Bryson, one of our greatest and most beloved nonfiction writers, transports readers on a journey back to one amazing season in American life. The summer of 1927 began with one of the signature events of the twentieth century: on May 21, 1927, Charles Lindbergh became the first man to cross the Atlantic by plane nonstop, and when he landed in Le Bourget airfield near Paris, he ignited an explosion of worldwide rapture and instantly became the most famous person on the planet. Meanwhile, the titanically talented Babe Ruth was beginning his assault on the home run record, which would culminate on September 30 with his sixtieth blast, one of the most resonant and durable records in sports history. In between those dates a Queens housewife named Ruth Snyder and her corset-salesman lover garroted her husband, leading to a murder trial that became a huge tabloid sensation. Alvin â??Shipwreckâ?ť Kelly sat atop a flagpole in Newark, New Jersey, for twelve daysâ??a new record. The American South was clobbered by unprecedented rain and by flooding of the Mississippi basin, a great human disaster, the relief efforts for which were guided by the uncannily able and insufferably pompous Herbert Hoover. Calvin Coolidge interrupted an already leisurely presidency for an even more relaxing three-month vacation in the Black Hills of South Dakota. The gangster Al Capone tightened his grip on the illegal booze business through a gaudy and murderous reign of terror and municipal corruption. The first true â??talking picture,â?ť Al Jolsonâ??s The Jazz Singer, was filmed and forever changed the motion picture industry. The four most powerful central bankers on earth met in secret session on a Long Island estate and made a fateful decision that virtually guaranteed a future crash and depression. All this and much, much more transpired in that epochal summer of 1927, and Bill Bryson captures its outsized personalities, exciting events, and occasional just plain weirdness with his trademark vividness, eye for telling detail, and delicious humor. In that year America stepped out onto the world stage as the main event, and One Summer transforms it all into narrative nonfiction of… (more)
User reviews
With a great eye for detail, along with a fondness for quirky cultural ephemera, Bryson makes the 1920's come alive. And while this may not have been his intent, he also illustrates why the "good old days" weren't so good, by pointing out that the per capita murder rate was much higher than it is today, that capital crimes were rarely solved, let alone the criminal brought to justice; that diseases that today are easily cured were fatal and that blatant prejudice against practically anyone who wasn't a white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant was pretty much the accepted norm.
Still, the summer of 1927 was the summer when America truly stepped out of the shadow of Europe and started running the world, and Bryson gives us all a ringside seat to the events that made that happen.
One interview I read with Bryson said he only wanted to write a book about Babe Ruth, since Bryson's a big baseball fan. When he discovered that the Lindberg flight was the same summer as Ruth's homerun
But then how could he leave out prohibition, Sacco and Vanzetti, Al Capone, "talking" pictures and so much more? Clearly, the man stumbling on a goldmine in his research. Very readable; hard to put down.
So much was going on in America during the summer
And so Bryson wanders from flagpole sitters to the severe flooding that covered much of the Midwest in water that summer to the invention of hot dogs to flappers to Prohibition. He tells us that Babe Ruth spent his first paycheck on a bicycle. The IQ test was designed to determine stupidity, not intelligence. The Rockettes were originally called the Roxyettes after Roxy Rothafel, founder of the Roxy theaters.
There is never a dull moment reading these nearly 500 pages. It makes one wonder what someone like Bryson might someday be able to write about the wild year 2020, with the impeachment of one president, the scandal uncovered in the administration of the previous president and the virus that shut down not just the country but the entire world. Bryson himself is too close to these events, hardly objective enough to do them justice. But 90 years from now, give or take, some writer will give it a go and amaze readers with the wonder of it all. Let's hope this writer will be the equal of Bill Bryson.
It's a great read.
Immersing me in the summer of 1927, I gained a long sought perspective on the stories my father told me of the great Babe Ruth, the Lindberg flight, Cleveland's Terminal Tower, and the indomitable heavyweight, Jack Dempsey. Growing up – and especially as a know-it-all teenager – I thought all this was just hot air, that nothing they did when my father was ten years old (he was born in 1917) could possibly compare to what was being done in the 1960s. Wrong! What a time it was and what a summer. Good grief Charlie Brown!
Again, five starts for Bill Bryson's "One Summer: America 1927. Caution, don't start reading at night, just sayin...
He also tackles the challenging fact that many of the USA elite in all fields and much of Jo public was racist and casual believers in eugenics in ways that suggest Nazis beliefs were radical extensions of common culture and 'scientific'' beliefs rather then the isolated extremism that became the accepted account of them after the war.
One summer. One third of the year. Just over a hundred days. You wouldn't think that the world could change that much during that time....but you'd be wrong. The summer of 1927 changed the world. Charles Lindbergh, an unknown pilot, became the first man to fly
This is a year that changed the world and Bill Bryson captures every event, the people involved, and the strange occurrences with a drop of humor, an eye for detail, and his ability to tell a deft and moving story. Reading Bryson's latest book is like sitting down at the table with you favorite uncle and a few of his friends. You know the ones that know a little bit about everything, have met everyone, and love telling a good story. Bryson introduces us to every event, every person, and everything that was of interest or weirdness for that year ranging from baseball to flights to fights to gangsters and more. Even better is that Bryson ties everything together. You'll see connections that you never though about before, pieces that fit just right in the course of this book.
There are just so many different stories that you could tell from this book, so many things that changed. I could write for pages and never be able to tell everything, even the favorite parts. But, for everything that happened though, Lindbergh is at the heart of this book. His flight kicked off this amazing year and created a firestorm throughout the world. His flight, his story, introduces us to media frenzy's, sparked innovations in the aviation industry among others including the movies, and more. Bryson expertly weaves all of this together expertly, showing us how things are connected and how this summer...this one summer in 1927 catapulted the United States to new heights in the world.
I've been a fan of Bryson's since a friend introduced me to a "Walk in the Woods" and I haven't regretted a moment since. Being able to reread his books is like talking to an old friend. And reading new ones is like being introduced to another friend in a tight group. If you're a fan of Bryson, a fan of history...heck it doesn't matter what you are, pick up this book. You won't regret it for a moment. 5 out of 5 stars.
This is popular history written with Bryson's characteristically infectious enthusiasm (I always imagine him as a kid rapt among the pages of an illustrated children's encyclopaedia) and with the deft touch of a master. His style is journalistic, but that is to praise not degrade it, for it is journalism of the highest quality.
Absent from Bryson's recent publications are the warm-hearted and humorous reflections on personal experience which are central to the enjoyment of his earlier travel books and his Thunderbolt Kid memoir. Impossible here as he is dipping into a period that preceded his own, but I hope he has not entirely abandoned his own life as material - there we see Bill Bryson at his incomparable best.
In One Summer: America, 1927, Bill Bryson departs from his usual approach to writing clever and wry travelogues to bring us a wonderful account of the events that defined one of the most memorable periods in American history. The book is full of detailed narratives—in fact, at almost 500 pages, perhaps too detailed—of notable people who lived at a time just out of memory for most of us alive now. Bryson makes the interesting decision of organizing the book into monthly sections, from May through September, which means that several of the stories (e.g., Babe Ruth’s pursuit of the home run record) play out over several chapters. I did not find this to be overly distracting, but it did create discontinuities in some of the individual tales, particularly those that required considerable “backfill” to create a proper context (e.g., Sacco and Vanzetti trials and convictions that lead to their execution, Henry Ford’s development of the modern automobile industry). Nevertheless, One Summer is an enlightening and entertaining look at one remarkable season in the United States that did nothing less than change the history of the world.