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Title details for One Summer by Bill Bryson - Available

One Summer

America, 1927

by Bill Bryson
Bill Bryson
Audiobook
1 of 1 copy available
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1 of 1 copy available
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.

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Awards

  • Release date

    October 1, 2013

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Listen audiobook

      • ISBN: 9780804127363
      • File size: 491325 KB
      • Duration: 17:03:35

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • AudioFile Magazine
      Bill Bryson offers up a chronicle of an eventful summer in American history: the summer of 1927. Bryson is an engaging narrator because of his evident interest in-- indeed, fascination with--the subjects he writes about. Informative and by turns wry, Bryson is enthusiastic, and his hint of a British accent is delightful as he describes a number of historical events: the fervor over Charles Lindbergh, Al Capone's singular success in the bootlegging trade, and the release of the first "talking picture." Bryson expertly ferrets out little known details and curiosities and tinges them with dashes of humor, making for a work chock full of facts that shed new light on the history you thought you already knew. S.E.G. (c) AudioFile 2013, Portland, Maine
    • Publisher's Weekly

      August 5, 2013
      “People in 1920s America were unusually drawn to spectacle,” states Bryson (A Short History of Nearly Everything) in his prologue—an unusual claim that his latest, a sprawling account of a brief period in a singular year in that decade, seems to want to substantiate. Whether or not the claim is objectively true, Bryson himself is captivated by the events of summer, 1927. And why not? They included Charles Lindbergh’s solo flight over the Atlantic, Sacco and Vanzetti’s execution, Gutzon Borglum’s start on the sculpting of Mt. Rushmore, the Dempsey-Carpentier fight, and Babe Ruth’s 60 home runs—all of which Bryson covers in characteristically sparkling prose. These notable happenings are worth relating and recalling, but others have done so, and more authoritatively and fully. Here, there’s not much connection between them; a string of coincidents (and there are many of those each day) hardly justify a book. So this isn’t history, nor is it really a story with a start, finish, and thematic spine. No analysis, only narrative—it’s diverting but slight.

Formats

  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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