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456 pages, Hardcover
First published August 1, 2013
Almost at once [in his first year of professional baseball] Ruth displayed the outsized appetite for which he became famous. The notion of being able to order whatever he wanted in hotel dining rooms was a treat he never got over. He also quickly discovered sex. He had no shyness there either. A teammate named Larry Gardner recalled walking into a room and finding Ruth on the floor having sex with a prostitute. “He was smoking a cigar and eating peanuts and this woman was working on him,” Gardner said in a tone of understandable wonder.
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.