18 October 2013
Bill Bryson write
two kinds of book – the travelogues which detail his first-hand
encounters with countries, communities and people across the world,
and his extensively desk-researched explorations (of Shakespeare,
science, domestic life etc). I think my favourite Bryson is his
childhood reminiscences 'The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid'
(reviewed here in 2007) which (just about) fits into the second
category. I particularly enjoyed his ability to conjure up the
characters of a different era. So I was looking forward to Bill
Bryson's new book 'One Summer: America 1927' which looks at five
remarkable months in which America changed the world. Reading 'One
Summer: America 1927' as an unabridged audio book, narrated by the
author, I was initially a little underwhelmed. While there was
nothing wrong with Bill Bryson's narration, I had just finished
listening to the stunning performance of Julian Rhind-Tutt reading
Jonathan Coe's novel 'Expo 58' (reviewed here in September 2013) and
I'm afraid anyone would have sounded a bit flat after that. Also Bill
Bryson's excessive use of statistics is particularly hard to take in
without seeing the numbers in front of you. But once he got beyond
the statistics and started to build pictures of the key individuals
in his story I became gripped. The summer of 1927 in America was
witness to an amazing array of events and an incredible cast of
characters. Charles Lindbergh became the first person to fly non-stop
across the Atlantic. In baseball Babe Ruth was breaking every record
in the books. The boxing match between Jack Dempsey and Gene Tunney
drew the largest crowd to any sporting event ever. The lazy
President, Calvin Coolidge, (about whose death Dorothy Parker would
later ask “How could they tell?”) decided not to run for office
at the end of his (unelected) term while future President Herbert
Hoover built his reputation co-ordinating the relief effort after the
great Mississippi flood. Al Capone presided over an empire of
corruption and extortion in Chicago. Henry Ford ended production of
his Model T and embarked on a spectacularly unsuccessful attempt to
create a rubber-producing city in the Amazon (Fordlandia). And
talking pictures arrived with Al Jolson in 'The Jazz Singer'. It was
quite a summer. Bill Bryson takes us chronologically through those
summer months – with digressions to fill in the before and after to
many of the stories. Lindbergh, Ruth and some of the other main
protagonists provide overarching narratives which hold the book
together. It's a powerful evocation of an era of prohibition,
gangsters, anarchist terrorists, adventurers and celebrities.
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