Friday, November 8, 2013

Friday Book Whimsy: One Summer: America, 1927

Author Bill Bryson did a most fascinating thing. He researched one year in America and wrote an interesting, information-packed, and funny book about the summer of 1927.

Bryson is one of my favorite authors. I have loved him since reading A Walk in the Woods, his story about hiking the Appalachian Trail. That book is entirely responsible for my adding a hike on the Appalachian Trail to my bucket list, something I was able to accomplish a couple of years ago. (Don’t get me wrong; I didn’t walk the entire trail. I simply walked on the trail, which was all I wanted to do.)

Bryson was born in the United States, but lived much of his life in Great Britain. He is fairly prolific, and all of his books are nonfiction, mostly accounts about nothing in particular. Sort of like a literary Seinfeld. He has a really quirky way of looking at things, and an absolutely wonderful way of putting ideas on paper. He can be hilariously funny, though I must say One Summer: America, 1927, isn’t particularly hilarious, nor is it intended to be. But it did make me laugh out loud on occasion. Bryson’s way of looking at life is very funny, very ironic.

I was interested in this book because my parents were born in 1926 and I wanted to see what was happening in the world at that particular time in our history. Bryson didn’t look at every single thing that happened, of course. He concentrated on some particularly unusual events and people who made up the fabric of that summer.

His focus: Charles Lindburgh’s historic flight across the Atlantic (and his subsequent unprecedented fame), Babe Ruth’s home run extravaganza (and his subsequent extravagant lifestyle), activities of the anarchist movement following WWI (and America’s subsequent hysteria regarding the movement), and the activities of President Calvin Coolidge and soon-to-be-President Herbert Hoover. Amongst these stories, Bryson wove in information about the creation of affordable air travel; the invention of radio, television, and talkies; Al Capone’s rise and downfall; baseball and boxing; the ludicracy of Prohibition; and much more.

One Summer isn’t written in a linear fashion; instead, Bryson weaves all of the stories together, giving the reader a strong sense of what it felt like to be an American in the Roaring Twenties. The country was wealthy and strong, following WWI. Though it was on the brink of a great depression, no one knew it at the time, nor would they have believed it if they had been told. Bryson even touches on what contributed to the stock market crash of 1929.

It was interesting to learn that the 21st Century doesn’t have a lock on extreme weather conditions. Did you know that in the spring and summer of 1927, there was massive flooding in the Midwest and a hurricane that killed a number of people later in the summer (not in the US)? There was a great heat wave in the East that also killed a number of Americans. And that was before Global Warming……

I admit that I did a bit of skimming. I wasn’t particularly interested, for example, on the facts around air travel. Skim, skim, skim. But I was fascinated by the stories about baseball. Bryson’s writing made me feel like I was at Yankee Stadium on a warm summer’s day. Even the stories about boxing kept me reading.

I enjoyed the book very much, and recommend it to anyone wanting to learn a bit of history in a pleasant way and by a funny teacher. I wonder if a person could take any given year and write an interesting history?

On a separate note, I also want to give a strong recommendation to a BBC series (not currently running, but available from Netflix and the library) entitled Call the Midwife. The series is based on the memoir written by Jennifer Worth about her time as a midwife in the East End of
London in the late 1950s.The midwives work with an order of Anglican nuns whose mission was to serve the poor as nurses. The series is beautifully written and acted. The stories are poignant and compelling. Call the Midwife has run two seasons thus far, and a third is on the way. Like with Downton Abbey, I can barely wait.

3 comments:

  1. I need to retire so I can read all these books. Oh, wait, I am retired!

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    Replies
    1. But you do need to read this book. I thought about you throughout, especially the baseball sections.

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  2. Love, love, love Call the Midwife. Book and TV series.

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