One Summer: America, 1927

It was one hell of a summer in 1927, when Charles Lindbergh, 25, made a nonstop solo flight from New York to Paris, when Babe Ruth, 32, broke his own home-run record by slugging 60 in the season, when Al Capone, 28, reigned American gangsters. In “One Summer, America 1927,” Bill Bryson pauses for a moment to remember just some of the things that happened that summer, by revealing unknown aspects of children of their ages, who are familiar even to Japanese. He painstakingly digs up news, goods, and works, to which ordinary people were unanimously mad about at that time. A title itself plays to our curiousness. It was a time people became wild easily. Frantic air overlaid the era. Spectators gathered in huge numbers to every event. Heroes and heroins met incidentally in this mood and were influenced by each other.America had been suffered from abnormal weather in that summer. It rained steadily across much of the country, sometimes in volumes not before seen. Heat wave of summer was under way. The Great Migration, blacks’ moving out from the South, began soon after the Mississippi flood, which lead to keeping out immigrant movements. Eugenics was a minion theory in that era. Bryson notes the fact sterilization laws still remain on the books in twenty states today. Extraordinary weather forced the federal government to accept that certain matters are too big for states to handle alone. The birth of Big Government in America. The canyon like streets and spiky skyline was largely a 1920s phenomena. Holland Tunnel was opened in 1927. A Mount Rushmore project was begun on. Constructing Golden Gate Bridge and Hoover Dam started. It was the same summer four men, from America, England, Germany, and French, gathered at the Long Island to discuss abolishing the gold standard. The result connected to the Great Depression. Calvin Coolidge presided over a booming economy and did nothing at all to get in the way of it.The 1920s was a great time for reading. Reading remained as a principal method for most people to fill idle time. It coincide precisely with the birth of tabloid papers and huge popularity of book clubs. Plausibility was not something that audiences needed for in the 1920s. An immense pulp fictions were printed out in this era. Bryson picks up the Sash Weight Murder Case to illustrate this frenzy. It would be overtaken soon by the passive distraction of radio. Lindbergh’s return in triumph was in many ways the day that radio came of age. American spent one-third of all the money for furniture on radios. The nation’s joy and obsession was baseball at that time. Baseball dominated and saturated American life culturally, emotionally. It was that summer Yankees won the American League championship with a league record, and Babe Ruth banged out 60 home runs. Boxing was also a 1920s phenomenon. Jack Dempsey - Gene Tunny Fight were held at the summer’s end of that year. Americans were excited about every on-the-spot broadcast. Many people came to find the automobile an essential part of life. One American in six owned a car by the late 1920s. It was getting close to a rate of one per family. And it was in the summer of 1927 that Henry Ford embarked on the most ambitious, and ultimately most foolish venture, the greatest rubber-producing estate, Fordlandia.The 1920s are dubbed as the Jazz Age, the Roaring Twenties, and the Era of Wonderful Nonsense. Musical performances were prospered. Big theaters had been constructed. It was a flourishing time for America, various cultural icons for American life style were created and introduced. American century began to blossom with full of life and energy. America’s winning the World War I exhibited it’s existence to the world. In 1927, Americans were not popular in Europe and not popular at all in France. The most striking things to a foreign visitor, arriving in America for the first time in 1927, was how staggeringly well-off it was. No other country they knew had ever been this affluence, and it seemed getting wealthier daily at a dizzily pace for them. It was the time TV started test broadcasting. Talkies began to take place of Silent Movies. Talking pictures were going to change the entertainment world thoroughly. It not only stole audiences from live theaters but also, and even worse, reaped talent. Who couldn’t speak English were kicked out from the industry. Through talkies America began to export American thoughts, attitudes, humor and sensibilities, peaceably, almost unnoticed. America had just taken over the world.It was a time of Prohibition. It was a time of despair for people of a conservative temperament. The 1920s were also an Age of Loathing. More people disliked more other people from more directions and for less reason. There were subversive activities. Foreign workers who couldn’t get job were thought to be anarchy. It was not a good time to be either a radical or an alien in America, and unquestionably dangerous to be both. Bryson takes up the Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti case to explain the atmosphere in this era. The European economies were uniformly wrecked while America’s was booming. America was blamed for it’s indifference to other countries suffering economic difficulties. Rejecting foreign workers led to bringing out negative feeling from other countries. Before the summer ended, millions of French would hate America, and it would actually be unsafe to be an American on French street.What did Lindberg’s success mean to American people. America has fallen behind from the rest of the world in every important area of technology in the 1920s. Lindbergh’s flight brought the world a moment of sublime, spontaneous, unifying joy on a scale never seen before for some unknowable reason. There would have been the gratifying novelty of coming first at something. America was suddenly dominant in nearly every field. In popular culture, finance and banking, military power, invention and technology, these center of gravity for the planet was moving from Europe to America. Charles Lindbergh’s flight somehow became the culminating expression of this. It is interesting to note Bryson counts as advantage for American fliers over European competitors is their using aviation fuel from California. It burned more cleanly and gave better mileage. It harbingers the coming oil century. It is impossible to imagine what was it about Charles Lindbergh and his 1927 flight to Paris that so transfixed the world in that summer. Bryson seems to have no interest about psychological analysis of heroes. He objectively piles up the facts from datas still remained. We are enthralled many times by accidental outcome resultant from connection between people and or tossed about by the tide. The greatest hero of the twentieth century was infinitely more of an enigma and considerably less of a hero than anyone had ever supposed. Alexis Carrel, a famous doctor at that time, provided Lindbergh with an enduring friendship and years of bad advice. Lindberg was invited to the Olympics in Berlin as a guest of the Nazis. He and his wife became unapologetic admirers of Adolf Hitler. People’s enthusiasm to Lindberg burnt out quickly and never returned. 1927 was substantially the first year of Showa in Japan. Showa actually started from the late December of the previous year. Ryuunosuke Akutagawa, a novelist, suicided from dimly obscured uneasiness in this year. It was an era militarism crept upon Japanese from the behind unnoticeably.

This is only my second Bill Bryson book, but "One Summer" certainly encourages me to read more. Although the title suggests the coverage will focus on 1927, the book in reality is a much broader perspective on important personalities and events of the entire decade of the 1920s and in some cases even beyond. For example, while Lindbergh's flight was in the summer of 1927, Bryson devotes considerable attention to his entire life, personality, and related events. This is not all a drawback - in fact, it gives the reader a much broader perspective on the whole decade.Now and then, Bryson gives a summary of what actually happened in the summer of 1927, and people who were prominent that year are the ones who dominated the decade. But Bryson also covers players other than the stars. For example, he gives considerable attention to various aviators who attempted the Atlantic both before and after Lindbergh. In fact, I got a bit tired of all the detail about such people, even though they did throw light on Lindbergh's accomplishment, especially since most of the other players ended up either in the Atlantic Ocean or crashing at the end of the takeoff runway. This same inclusive trend was apparent for other 1927 celebrities as well. Babe Ruth was a star in the book, but other players such as Lou Gehrig and Ty Cobb also were in the picture.Bryson's writing is precise, witty, and highly entertaining. The best aspect of the book is that Bryson reveals so much about personalities - Hoover, admittedly a man who solved many world problems, from European hunger to Midwest flood relief, was strong on self-promotion and short on social niceties. Coolidge comes off even less involved than his traditional image. Sacco and Vanzetti remain enigmas - did they do it or not? And the book is certainly no hagiography for the heroes of the age - Lindbergh, Babe Ruth, etc. - nor the villains, such as Al Capone. All in all, "One Summer" is my kind of history. Covers the main events, but adds snippets that most historians would pass over; also, related details that humanize personalities and give the reader a real sense of what the decade was about. The reason I rate the book 4-1/2 stars rather than 5 is that some aspects were covered in a bit too much detail. But I found the book highly informative and great fun to read. I think we could have done without the long epilogue, however, or been better off with a condensed version. Too many folks ending up with mental problems, too much alcohol, or other unfortunate tragedies.

Bryson is one of my favorite author and a consistant pleasure to read.So much work goes into the elaboration of his books.Entertaining and educational.

Bill Bryson takes us back to the USA of a hundred years ago, focussing on the months between May and September 1927 and introducing us to people whom we've probably heard of such as President Calvin Coolidge (and his successor Herbert Hoover), baseball players Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig, boxers Jack Dempsey and Gene Tunney, and aviator Charles Lindberg, who made the first solo nonstop flight from New York to Paris on May 20-21 in the Spirit of St Louis. Digging deeper, he tells us about, for example, Clifford Holland, the designer and chief engineer for the tunnel under the Hudson River which connected Lower Manhattan and Jersey City; the stress of working on this project caused Holland to have a nervous breakdown, followed by a fatal heart attack at the age of 41. The tunnel was named in his memory when it was opened in 1927 (and even though the same fate befell his successor as chief engineer after four months on the job, he received no commemoration). As is characteristic of Bryson's books, this one is packed with eye-catching details like this, including:* the life expectancy of a British pilot in 1917 was put at just eight days [p17]* when Lindberg and Donald Hall, the designer of The Spirit of St Louis, realised they had no idea of how far it was from New York to Paris, they "went to a public library and measured the distance on a globe with a piece of string" [p74]* not only did Babe Ruth famously greet President Coolidge at a match with "Hot as hell, ain't it, Prez?", but he also referred to the holders of a party as the "hostess and hoster" [p181]* during WWI, anti-German sentiment was so rife (following - for example - the sinking of the RMS Lusitania en route from New York to Liverpool) that William Harding, the governor of Iowa, outlawed the public use of foreign languages. This included churches, where Harding proclaimed that "God is listening only to the English tongue" [p228]* one of the problems facing Henry Ford's construction of Fordlandia, a model American community in the jungles of Brazil, was the candiru, a little fish which is alleged to swim into the human urethra and then extend backward-facing spines which made it difficult to extract [p331].* during a spate of domestic parcel bombing, all the parcels bore a (false) return address of Gimbel Brothers department store in Manhattan. One parcel was returned there for insufficient postage, whereupon the unsuspecting clerk "opened the package, examined the odd contents - bottle of acid, timer, explosives - then packed it all up again, added the necessary postage and mailed it on" [p369].* John Logie Baird, demonstrator of the world's first live working television system in 1926, so disliked the portly chairman of the board which had been foisted on his company that he narrowed the doorway to his lab, necessitating the chairman to be pushed through from behind when he got stuck on his first (and last) visit [p495].Such nuggets make this an entertaining and stimulating read. The other thing which struck me was the depth of incompetence, corruption and/or wickedness exhibited by some (not all) of the politicians of the time, culminating in (the admittedly extreme example of) William "Big Bill" Thompson, mayor of Chicago (1915-23, 1927-31), who was openly allied with Al Capone, claimed that George V was intent on annexing Chicago, and set about removing all works deemed treasonous or un-American from the city's schools and libraries. Just as striking was the degree of support which he enjoyed from the voters and - to some extent - the media.Other examples came from the cabinet of Warren Harding, Coolidge's predecessor, in which the military advisor had formerly been his newsboy, the head of the Veteran's Bureau managed to steal or lose $200 million and the interior secretary corruptly sold oil leases (one of which was in a place known as Teapot Dome, which gave its name to the ensuing scandal) in return for $400,000 in "loans". Later on, the Coolidge administration (described as being "dedicated to inactivity" [p89]) included Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon (today commemorated in the name of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh), who introduced tax cuts which "conveniently enhanced his own wealth", had the IRS send its best men to prepare his tax returns so that he paid as little as possible, and asked the Secretary of State to help one of his companies secure a lucrative Chinese contract.Such accounts illustrate the value of reading about history (particularly in such an enjoyable book as this), because "those who cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it". Indeed.

The summer of 1927 - momento de euforia entre o que veio antes e o que veio a ser do século XX . Lindo panorama: divertido, informativo e inteligente ❣️❣️ Bill Bryson é maravilhoso… beautiful job of translating the wondrous world he captures and tô lend us his lenses

Couldn't put it down. Laced with Bryson-style humor throughout.

El estilo ameno y divertido de Bryson nos lleva por la historia del apasionante año 27 en Estados Unidos. Un año repleto de hechos históricos en una sociedad moderna y efervescente antes del crack del 29. Ojalá todos los libros de historia fueran así. Totalmente recomendable.

I had never read anything by Bill Bryson before, but I'll certainly seek out more of his works after reading One Summer: America 1927. It is an excellent and entertaining account of arguably the most fascinating year in American history. That summer saw Charles Lindbergh and a handful of other aviators make historic flights, Babe Ruth's 60 home run season, horrible flooding on the Mississippi River, the continued farce of Prohibtion, the Dempsey-Tunney rematch, a noteworthy murder trial, the birth of talking films, and other significant developments. Bryson presents it all in an entertaining manner that grabs the reader's attention. A few factual goofs slips through the cracks: Bryson refers to Newfoundland as being a Canadian province in 1919. (It wouldn't be for another 30 years.) He says Lou Gehrig began his "Iron Man" streak by pinch-hitting for Wally Pipp. (It was actually for shortstop Pee Wee Wanninger.) Those trivial errors are forgivable given the massive work and overall excellence of his work. History buffs will love this book!