It must have been pretty tough for Bill Bryson to choose a single year in US history to focus his latest book on, but somehow he’s managed to settle on 1927. Titled, One Summer: America 1927, it focuses on a seemingly random year, but surely there’s got to be some method in the madness wherever Bill Bryson is involved.
With the First World War well and truly out of the way, the early rumbles of World War II not quite on the horizon and two years to go before the bleak times of the Wall Street crash of ’29, and subsequent global recession, America was in a position of interwar supremacy where it “attempted and accomplished outsized things and came of age in a big, brawling manner”, as the book’s synopsis tells us. This gives us a glimpse of the peacetime USA that would go on to shape modern America as well as providing some of the country’s most enduring characters.
Set for hardback release on the 26th September 2013, it’ll be an instant best seller as ever for Bill Bryson and a sure fire banker for Christmas present wish lists everywhere. Standing at a massive 499 pages long there’s not going to be much that could possibly be missed out from the book’s coverage of the summer of 1927 in the USA.
The year features icons of American history, including Babe Ruth, Herbert Hoover, Charles Lindbergh and Calvin Coolidge as well as some of the more notorious characters like Al Capone and lesser known eccentrics like Shipwreck Kelly.
The year also encompasses the opening of the Roxy Theatre in New York, the first ever armoured car robbery near Pittsburgh, the foundation of the Bureau of Prohibition, the first successful long distance demonstration of television by Bell Telephone Co. transmitting an image of Herbert Hoover (then the Secretary of Commerce), the foundation of The Academy of Motion Arts and Sciences, the first solo nonstop transatlantic flight from New York City to Paris by Charles Lindbergh in his monoplane the Spirit of St. Louis, the start of work on Mount Rushmore, and the first transmissions from The Columbia Phonographic Broadcasting System (or CBS as we now know it), so it’ll be interesting to read all about these in detail and more in the new book.
With his previous success in travel writing for his homeland with The Lost Continent and A Walk in the Woods and documentation of scientific innovations in Seeing Further: The History of Science at The Royal Academy and A Short History of Nearly Everything, Bill Bryson is probably the best person to write about the States in 1927. If you can think of anyone better it’s too late, One Summer: America 1927 is already finished and on it’s way.
