It’s hard not to like Bill Bryson…he comes across as an ideal traveling companion: knowledgeable and informed, entertaining, and at times a bit cranky, but always amusingly so. I’ve enjoyed his travel books on the USA, Australia, and England…they actually are like taking a road trip with a good friend and dinner conversationalist. One Summer is a little different, but Bryson’s equally good company on an American history tour: he takes us back to a time just barely within current memory, and gives us an in-depth narrative of what was going on in May through September of 1927.

If you are a baseball fan or an aviation enthusiast, your cup runneth over. It’s the year of Babe Ruth’s home run record (and his home run race with Lou Gehrig, his fellow New York Yankee) as he played with arguably the greatest baseball squad ever to take the field. And it’s the summer that Charles Lindbergh crossed the Atlantic from New York to Paris and became the most famous man in the world. (Celebrity, unfortunately, did not agree with him much.)

Plenty else happened. The Jazz Singer (the first “talking picture”) was released. There was a sensational murder trial and two accused anarchists were executed. Al Capone was at the top of his game in Chicago. Calvin Coolidge took a long vacation. The Mississippi River flooded catastrophically. Work began on Mount Rushmore. Henry Ford stopped making the Model T. The Holland Tunnel opened. There were cars, radios, refrigerators, telephones, and (brand new!) television.

It’s not a very organized account. The competing stories (daily life, business, government, sports, etc.) pick up and drop off, and get resumed chapters later, and lots of background information gets inserted, almost parenthetically, into the narrative.  It’s odd having cliffhangers in a history book, but it certainly makes for interesting reading. Reading One Summer is actually a bit like listening to a garrulous liberal arts professor, who knows a little something about just about everything, especially after he’s had a few drinks. Oh, where was I? Ah yes, back to Jack Dempsey. And Herbert Hoover. And Charles Ponzi (yes, he of the eponymous Ponzi scheme). And Clara Bow.

There was plenty of violence in the 1920s in the USA. The homicide rate then was far higher than today, and two thirds(!) of murders went unsolved. The Ku Klux Klan was popular. So was eugenics. Racism was virulent. Foreigners were viewed with suspicion, and immigration was severely restricted.

And there was jazz music, cocktails (despite their illegality during the Prohibition era), the Charleston, the strange pastime of flagpole sitting (Alvin “Shipwreck” Kelly sat atop one for twelve days in Newark, New Jersey, breaking a world record), ticker tape parades, celebrity culture, and all manner of street life (air conditioning hadn’t yet become widespread).

I can only hope that someone like Bill Bryson is around in another 90+ years to so capture the achievements, hypocrisies, failures, foibles, and entertainments of today so that our great grandchildren can know (and enjoy) a little bit of our time here, too.

BOOK: One Summer: America, 1927

AUTHOR: Bill Bryson

YEAR OF PUBLICATION: 2013

IMAGE: book cover, Anchor