Sunday, December 7, 2014

Book review: Bill Bryson's latest pleases and amazes

"It was one hell of a summer." So begins the last clause of the last sentence of the last chapter (bar the epilogue) of Bill Bryson's latest tour de force, One Summer: America 1927 (Doubleday 2013), which Walt recommends most highly.

Bill Bryson is one of my favourite writers. But it must be said that the quality and "interest quotient" of his earlier works (especially his travel books) is more consistently good than that of his more recent writing. Of all his books, I can think of only three that I haven't particularly enjoyed. Two of those -- A Short History of Nearly Everything and At Home -- are among the more recent.

So it was with a bit of doubt that I laid out the spondulix (Bryson would love that word) for One Summer, wondering if I might later suffer from buyer's remorse. I didn't.

Although the dust jacket illustration of the Spirit of St. Louis, a baseball player and a flapper should have tipped me off, I also wondered what happened in the summer of 1927 that merited a whole long(ish) book. Here, from the last chapter (bar the epilogue) is the answer.

Babe Ruth hit sixty home runs. The Federal Reserve made the mistake that precipitated the stock market crash. Al Capone enjoyed his last summer of eminence. The Jazz Singer was filmed. Television was created. Radio came of age. Sacco and Vanzetti were executed. President Coolidge chose not to run. Work began on Mount Rushmore. The Mississippi flooded as it never had before. A madman in Michigan blew up a school and killed forty-four people in the worst slaughter of children in American history. Henry Ford stopped making the Model T and promised to stop insulting Jews. And a kid from Minnesota flew across an ocean and captivated the planet in a way it had never been captivated before.

The kid, of course, was Charles Lindbergh. One Summer begins and ends with him. In between, Mr. Bryson manages -- this is the amazing part -- to tie together all of the events and personalities mentioned above, as well as countless others of lesser note. The depth and detail of his narrative is astounding. Besides being a voracious reader, I believe he must have had at least one very good research assistant. [Hey! Is that a dig at me? Ed.]

It is a tribute to Bill Bryson's skill as a writer that, although One Summer runs to 458 pages -- plus notes, suggestions for further reading, a bibliography and index! -- I found it a fast-paced and entertaining read. It's part social history, part biography, and part pure story-telling. And, as they say, the whole is much more than the sum of its parts. Best new book I've read this year.

Post scriptum et caveat: It must be said that some fairly large chunks of One Summer -- particularly the story of Charles Lindbergh -- have been, errr, recycled from Made in America (Martin Secker & Warburg, 1994). But since Made in America antedates the travel books that made Bill Bryson famous, many of you may not have read it. And even if you did, Mr. Bryson is such a good storyteller that you won't mind a rerun.

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