With Lindbergh temporarily unavailable, what America needed was some kind of sublimely pointless distraction, and a man named Shipwreck Kelly stood ready to provide it. At 11 am on June 7, Kelly clambered to the top of a 50-foot flagpole on the roof of the St. Francis Hotel in Newark, New Jersey, and sat there. That was all he did, for days on end, but people were enchanted and streamed to Newark to watch.

It takes some effort of imagination to appreciate how novel radio was in the 1920s. It was the wonder of the age. By the time of Lindbergh’s flight, one-third of all the money America spent on furniture was spent on radios. Stations sprouted everywhere. In a single day in 1922, the number of American radio stations went from 28 to 570.

In 1927, New York has just overtaken London as the world’s largest city . . . By 1927, New York had half the nation’s skyscrapers . . . The canyon-like streets and spiky skyline that we associate with New York is largely a 1920s phenomenon.

For Warren G. Harding, the summer of 1927 was not a good one, which was perhaps a little surprising since he had been dead for nearly four years by then. Few people have undergone a more rapid and comprehensively negative reappraisal than America’s twenty-ninth President. When he died suddenly in San Francisco on August 2, 1923 … he was widely liked and admired. … At the time of his death President Harding was on the brink of being exposed as a scoundrel and a fool.

Many people closely involved in the case, then and later, concluded that Sacco and Vanzetti were certainly guilty of something.

Across such a distance of time, it is impossible to say anything with certainty, but there are grounds for suspecting that they were not perhaps as innocent as they made themselves out.

Altogether at least 60,000 people were sterilized because of Laughlin’s efforts. At its peak in the 1930s, some thirty states had sterilization laws, though only Virginia and California made wide use of them. It is perhaps worth noting that sterilization laws remain on the books in 20 states today.

But it does not take much imagination to recognize that even these “serious” topics had a strong tabloid appeal: ignoble aspects (for the KKK) and prurient (for eugenics).



Also toward the end of the book, methods of communication make a strong pitch for notice: radio, nascent television, popular authors like Zane Grey and Edgar Rice Burroughs. The popular authors outsold the F. Scott Fitzgeralds of the time. RCA, NBC and CBS are early entries in mass communications.



In writing about writers, Bryson makes an attempt to pin his subjects down to the summer of 1927 since this is, after all, the alleged focus of his book.

Among serious writers of fiction, only Sinclair Lewis enjoyed robust sales in the summer of 1927. Elmer Gantry was far and away the bestselling fiction book of that year. The novel sold 100,000 copies on its first day of sale, and was cruising towards 250,000 by the end of the summer …

. . .

Hemingway produced no novel in 1927. He was mostly preoccupied with personal affairs – he divorced one wife and wed another …

. . .

Also well received, but not runaway commercial successes, were The Bridge of San Luis Rey by a new writer named Thornton Wilder, and Mosquitoes by another newcomer, William Faulkner.

F. Scott Fitzgerald, the other American literary giant of the age – to us, if not to his contemporaries – produced no book in 1927.

Since I have drifted into culture, let it be noted that Bela Lugosi opened on Broadway in the play Dracula in September 1927. He made his entire career from that character. We take a brief stroll down Broadway in the neighborhood of, but not the block, of 1927. And we are told that the heyday of Broadway ended about that time with the advent of the talking pictures. The movies took the Broadway audiences, actors and writers. So says Bill Bryson.



I have said a couple of times that it would be interesting to see the Notes that appear in the final edition. Seems to me that Bryson may have occasionally sacrificed facts for a good story. He covers his ass, as they say, with phrases such as “according to one authority” and “it has been suggested” and many other variations on the iffy vernacular. You may have noticed I have reverted to some maybe’s myself! Maybe is just another way of being flexible.



If you are from Chicago or Indiana, you may be pleased to hear that these two locations get some special attention from Bryson. Actually, you may not be pleased since a lot of the attention is on crime and corruption. You might not agree that Al Capone was a model citizen.

Capone has also many times credited with the line, “You can get a lot farther with a smile and a gun than you can get with just a smile,” but it appears he probably never said that either.

The Prologue tells of Lindbergh’s life before The Flight and the Epilogue his life after. In one short paragraph, Bill Bryson lists the events and people of the summer of 1927 that he observed for 450 pages. As any good tabloid, the Epilogue exposes some quirks and tells how the people died.

Apart from Lindbergh’s airplane in the Air and Space Museum in Washington and Babe Ruth’s bat and sixtieth home run ball in the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York, almost nothing remains from the summer of 1927.

To that short list of objects you might now add this book, One Summer: America, 1927 by Bill Bryson. But to fill 450 pages Bryson had to stretch out the summer to much of the year and the era to all the years the people of 1927 lived. You shouldn’t expect him to do justice to such an extended period. He has entertained me, as he has done in some of his previous books, but he has neither made my spirit soar nor my mind marvel nor my pulse quicken. He has written a three star book that entertained without enthralling and that informed without compelling.



It has been a long time since I have read a Bill Bryson book so when I happened upon an opportunity to win an ARC of, I jumped at the chance. Bryson is nothing if not prolific. He cranks them out. C-SPAN’s Book TV has an eight minute interview with him about his most recent effort: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AEx_GC... Since I received the ARC ofjust a month before publication, I was not able to read the entire 448 page book prior to its publication. But I do want to say a few words about it even after publication since Bill Bryson is, for me, a Blast from the Past with this summer of eighty-six years ago. Two central events of the book are the Lindbergh flight from NYC to Paris and Babe Ruth’s sixty home runs. The Prologue covers many of the unsuccessful efforts to fly between Paris and NYC. But many more events are covered in this three-ring circus of a book. The action never stops. It would be hard to say that many of these tabloid news events warrant so much attention so many decades later. However, the entertainment value is high. If you are a Bryson aficionado, you don’t want to miss this one.Bryson, you will not be surprised to hear, was not totally fixated on the year 1927. He covers some of the family history of Charles Lindbergh. He writes of the lives and presidencies of a snoozing Calvin Coolidge and a self-aggrandizing Herbert Hoover. Coolidge was actually President in 1927. As the Commerce Secretary Hoover was appointed the head of relief efforts in response to the unprecedented Mississippi River flood of 1927 during which the great river was in flood stage for over 150 days.U.S. population in 1927: 120 millionU.S. v. Sullivan: 1927 Supreme Court case that established the legality of the IRS pursuing tax evasion charges against criminals for ill-gotten gains.The Spirit of St. Louis took off from Roosevelt Field, Long Island, NY at 7:52 am on May 20, 1927 and landed in Paris 33½ hours and 3600 miles later.Bryson detours from Lindbergh for a while to begin to tell us the story of the life of Babe Ruth who was born in 1895 leaving some distance to be covered before we arrive in the signature year of 1927. But even diversions have their own diversions in this homegrown history of many years rolled somehow into one. The segues from the Spirit of St. Louis to Shipwreck Kelly to The House that Ruth Built to radio coming of age are not always smooth.And as Babe Ruth is sold by the Boston Red Sox to the New York Yankees, we slip nimbly into pages about New York City.Prohibition in the U.S. lasted thirteen years. One of those years was 1927 so Prohibition gets a chapter in the book. There is no lack of stories about Prohibition and Bryson tells many of them – poisons being added to some forms of alcohol and padlocked establishments having customers enter through the back door are a couple of examples. The phrase “giving a hand’ (applause) to an entertainer was allegedly coined during Prohibition and was probably uttered several times in the summer of 1927!You may think that with four seasons in a year, each would have three months. You will not be surprised, I am sure, to learn that for the purposes of his book Bill Bryson extended the summer of 1927 to five months – May through September. I can only wonder if, when asked about this, Bryson said, “So sue me!” The connections of the book to the summer of the title are not always self evident. You just have to go along for the ride.The flight of Commander Richard Byrd from New York to Paris weeks after Lindbergh is given some considerable attention although Byrd arrived in Paris by train since the plane was forced to land in the ocean along the coast of France. Evidence is given of serious misinformation given by Byrd and his chief pilot Bert Acosta about the trip; foremost is the fact that the co-pilot Bernt Balchen actually did almost all of the actual piloting as a result of the lack of skill of the pilot Acosta who knew nothing about flying on instruments, an integral part of the journey.Cramming events of other years into 1927 continued with abandon:If you like tabloid journalism and “Ripley’s Believe It or Not,” I can almost promise that you will like. Although it is somewhat long, it’s an easy read that seems determined to amaze and amuse. Frippery may be too strong a word but no one should expect too much of consequence from this book. The ARC I read was missing the bibliography and notes from the end, additions that may be of value to those who are interested in pursuing the historical aspects of the book. But I think you will likely findmore entertaining than stimulating.More weak tangents to 1927: boxing and Fordlandia. Fordlandia was a failed Henry Ford development in Brazil in 1928. There were some well known boxing matches in that era, but, again, a summer 1927 connection is a stretch. But, hey, it’s just the title of the book so I probably shouldn’t be so demanding about the content as long as it is interesting. Much of it is interesting without dwelling overlong on many of the topics. We are talking blurbs here of a page or two for those with a short attention span. History in the form of birdshot.The August segment of the book leads off with a twenty page story of Sacco and Vanzetti, the Italian anarchists convicted of a payroll robbery and murder that occurred in Massachusetts in 1920 and culminated in their execution in August of 1927. After dipping briefly into the announcement of President Coolidge that he will not to run for re-election in 1928, we find ourselves in the story of the carving of Mount Rushmore in South Dakota. Zip, zip, zip. We move quickly.Silent films turned to talkies in the 1920s and Clara Bow morphed from the It Girl to the has-been because her voice just would not do on screen – “the vocal equivalent of nails on a blackboard.”Few difficult questions are asked in. However, one question directly related to the book was asked: “Were Sacco and Vanzetti innocent?” Bryson equivocates and vacillates. He names some who thought they were guilty and boldly states:For himself, Bryson says,He did not specifically note the positions of the tabloids that were often evidently a trusted source. This is one place I wish I had the final edition complete with notes. I am sure Bryson must have been more forthcoming there. But, here again, I am probably taking this book too seriously. It is not investigative journalism by any means. To call it “fluff” is too cruel for me but I am sure that some would use that appellation!In fairness I should note that serious consideration and topics are not totally absent from. In the section titled “Summer’s End,” the Ku Klux Klan and eugenics are examined in some detail. The information about the eugenics movement in the 1920s and 1930s is chilling. In 1927 a U.S. Supreme Court case (Buck v. Bell) was decided 8 to 1 in favor of eugenic sterilization.