One Summer: America, 1927

Bryson, Bill

ISBN 10: 0739315293 ISBN 13: 9780739315293

Publisher: Random House, 2013

Synopsis

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 “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.
From the Hardcover edition.

About this title

Review:

"Bill Bryson is a true master of popular narrative. Over the course of his career, he has bestowed a beautiful clarity on even the most recondite of subjects...Has history ever been so enjoyable?" -- Craig Brown Mail on Sunday "A gripping slice of history with all sorts of reverberant echoes of today...Bryson, the travel writer turned non-fiction impresario, has now invented what may be an entirely new genre of non-fiction: the brief history of an era told through the biography of a summer." -- Matt Ridley The Times "A fascinating snapshot of a season during which America, for better or worse, ushered in the modern world." Sunday Times "A gifted raconteur...The book is filled with eccentric, flamboyant characters and memorable stories...highly amusing." Guardian "A great new form of literature: biography of a few months in one country." -- Matt Ridley The Times (Books of the Year)

Book Description:

Let Bill Bryson take you back to a forgotten summer when America came of age and changed the world for ever – and show you why he is our favourite writer of narrative non-fiction.

About this edition

• Publisher: Random House
• Publication date: 2013
• ISBN 10: 0739315293
• ISBN 13: 9780739315293
• Binding: Audio CD
• Number of pages: 14