One Summer: America, 1927

One Summer: America, 1927 - Bill Bryson The summer of 1927 was amazingly rife with historic and newsworthy events. Mr. Bryson manages to bring these events together in this factual, well-researched and entertaining narrative. Most of the events he brings forth in the book are events of which I was well aware, but never put together the short time span in which they all took place. The summer of 1927 saw Charles Lindbergh make the first non-stop trans-Atlantic flight; Alvin Kelly broke the flagpole-sitting record when he sat up high in New Jersey for 12 days; the Mississippi basin flooded with torrential rains; secret bank meetings pretty much ensured a depression, and Babe Ruth hit his 60th home run. From Al Capone to Al Jolson and from prohibition to eugenics, Mr. Bryson doesn’t miss a thing.

This is the first of Mr. Bryson’s books that I have read and let me tell you, it will definitely not be last. He brings these events together in a smooth narrative that is entertaining and informative. Read by Mr. Bryson himself, I picked up the audio version of this book. Not only does Mr. Bryson write a marvelous glimpse into One Summer of history but narrates it superbly.

The only question I was left with at the end of this book … how is it that Mr. Bryson was seemingly the first to pick up on the significance of the summer in 1927? Or, can one arbitrarily pick a year and a season and find that equally interesting and significant things took place?