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 “Shipwreck” Kelly sat atop a flagpole in
Newark, New Jersey, for twelve days—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 “talking picture,” Al Jolson’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 the highest order.
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