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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