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. Whatever else it was, it was one hell of a summer.I'm sure that Bill Bryson thought that his research proves that 1927 had one hell of a summer, but if the above sounds like a long list of subject matter, it's about a quarter of what he squeezed into this book. Even the main events -- Charles Lindbergh's crossing of the Atlantic in the Spirit of St. Louis and Babe Ruth's record-breaking homerun streak -- were long and tedious, and ultimately, boring tales to me. Add on stories that can't possibly have wide appeal (obscure eugenicists and early television engineering) and I found this book to be just annoying. And to be clear: I'm a person of eclectic tastes, I enjoy history and biographies, but this was just tortuous; it must have been the writing.
It's also a bit misleading: Although the title purports to be about the summer of 1927, Bryson divides the book into chapters covering May to September, and to elongate the tale even further, he provides the full histories of the subjects he selects, recording events from the late 1800s to the 1930s (and beyond in the epilogue where he describes how everyone died). This works for figures like Babe Ruth (it's interesting to read that he was raised in an orphanage and then dominated every position in baseball -- although I've probably heard all that before) but it felt like a stretch to learn everything about Henry Ford and the history of the Ford Motor Company when, in the summer of 1927, the auto-plants were shut down for retooling in order to eventually launch the Model A.
Hidden in the dross were a few good nuggets: Henry Ford sued the Chicago Tribune for libel after the paper called him an "ignorant idealist". On the stand, Ford couldn't recall who Benedict Arnold was ("A writer, I think?"), when the Revolutionary War had been fought ("1812, I think?"), but did remember voting for James Garfield (who had been assassinated three years before Ford had reached voting age. The jury found in Ford's favour, however, and awarded him 6¢). I liked the irony of Cargill turning Fordlandia (a spectacularly failed rubber plantation in Brazil) into a profitable soybean farm (as Ford was apparently obsessed with the utility and healthfulness of soybeans). I also enjoyed the irony of Al Capone's brother working as a bodyguard for President Coolidge. I was fascinated every time Ty Cobb was mentioned ("I don't care if he has no feet!") and wish that Bryson had focussed more on "the most unstable man in baseball" than on the good-hearted, righteous (and therefore, boring) Lou Gehrig. And after recognising the contributions that Lindbergh made to aviation (and going into minute detail about his flight and its fame-building aftermath in the summer of 1927), it was interesting to learn that he became a great fan of Hitler's, made a career-ending Anti-Semitic speech at an America First conference, and went on to have seven children with three different European mistresses (the last fact so discreet that it escaped the notice of Lindbergh's official biographers).
One Summer : America, 1927 really didn't work for me: too long; too dull; too unfocussed; thoroughly lacking in any of the charming storytelling that Bryson is loved for. I think I'll just stick with his travelogues from now on.
