Soundbite of History

It is a large book of non-fiction, 480 pages including the 13 pages of sources used, hardly a tome most people would characterize as a page-turner, but it is. Bill Bryson, who is one of America’s finest modern writers, takes a look at One Summer (the title of the book), the summer of 1927, and presents a confluence of people, places, and events that forever changed America, and, by extension, the rest of the world. There are people’s names that will ring a bell in the reader’s memory, such as Babe Ruth, Charles Lindbergh, and Al Capone, and other important people whose names are not so well-known, such as Charles Francis Jenkins, Robert G. Elliott, and Willis Blakely.

Charles Lindbergh did more to advance aviation in 1927 than any other pilot, and, yes, there were other pilots, as well as regularly-scheduled flights between major cities in Europe. I had always pictured the Wright brothers initial flight as a “one of,” but was surprised to know that Europe was well ahead of the United States in the development of aviation. Lindbergh’s contribution stemmed from crossing the Atlantic Ocean, thus validating inter-continental flight development. His relentless publicity tour of the United States following his memorable flight across the Atlantic forever linked Lindbergh’s name to the development of aviation, but what he primarily accomplished was publicizing aviation, not creating it.

Also during the summer of 1927, the name of Alfred Ponzi, perhaps only known for what became a Ponzi scheme, made his name forever synonymous with generating huge amounts of money on the backs of hapless investors who lost everything they put into Ponzi’s investment schemes. The motion picture industry thrived with the advent of talking films, wherein the soundtrack was invented that would allow characters to talk and actions to have appropriate noises. Alvin “Shipwreck” Kelly climbed a flagpole on top of a building and spent 49 days sitting there. Mount Rushmore began to take shape, but its sculptor, Gutzon Borglum, did not live to see it completed. Most interestingly to me, this is also the summer when four financiers met in secret to formulate financial plans that led directly to the stockmarket crash and the Great Depression of 1929.

Bryson’s work is a study in American history and should be required reading for every student in the United States school system, whether at the high school level or under-graduate degree programs at community colleges, as well as universities. The narration is easy to read while also being content rich. The strands of the story, from May through September 1927, are woven carefully to form a cohesive over-view of what it was like both in America and the world during this time, and forms the significance of people, places and events in a way that brings the story alive. The twelve pages of bibliography, in a very small typeface, as well as the end notes, also prove to any student that there are sources available to tell any story – if the writer cares enough about the subject matter to research it.