In its pre-release marketing blurb, Random House - publishers of the brilliant Bill Bryson's latest upcoming book release (shown above in UK and US covers, respectively) whets our appetite for what promises a captivating romp through a rollicking, short period of of U.S history: "The summer of 1927 began with one of the signature events of the twentieth century: on May 21, 1927, Charles Lindbergh became the first man to cross the Atlantic by plane nonstop, and when he landed in Le Bourget airfield near Paris, he ignited an explosion of worldwide rapture and instantly became the most famous person on the planet. Meanwhile, the titanically talented Babe Ruth was beginning his assault on the home run record, which would culminate on September 30 with his sixtieth blast, one of the most resonant and durable records in sports history.
"In between those dates a Queens housewife named Ruth Snyder and her corset-salesman lover garroted her husband, leading to a murder trial that became a huge tabloid sensation. Alvin “Shipwreck” Kelly sat atop a flagpole in Newark, New Jersey, for twelve days—a new record. The American South was clobbered by unprecedented rain and by flooding of the Mississippi basin, a great human disaster, the relief efforts for which were guided by the uncannily able and insufferably pompous Herbert Hoover."
Bryson's brand of detailed retelling coupled with his trademark humor promise a delicious narrative nonfiction sampler of the stage that set the the world's first talking picture (Al Jolson's The Jazz Singer), political retreat of one-term President Calvin Coolidge, beginning and end of the bloody trail of Al Capone and a secret session of powerful bankers on Long Island that would ultimately led to a devastating stock market crash and the Great Depression.
USA today describes One Summer, America 1927 as one of the coolest books for fall. Bryson himself says in an interview online that though there was a: "frenetic amount of activity that summer," sometimes: "these things just happen at the same time".
I've heard Bill Bryson read from several of his books over the past decade or so, whenever he has been on book tour here in the Bay Area. I'd imagine (and certainly hope) he'll be making a pit-stop here in the North Bay for One Summer, America 1927.
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