Book of the week: One Summer: America, 1927 by Bill Bryson

(Doubleday, $29)

Bill Bryson will make you wish that he had been your high school history teacher, said Steve Novak in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. If your fuzzy memory tells you that the peacetime year of 1927 was relatively unremarkable, Bryson’s One Summer will convince you otherwise. During that one season alone, Charles Lindbergh became the first man to fly solo across the Atlantic, the Mississippi River flooded like it never has since, work began on the sculpting of Mount Rushmore, and Babe Ruth hit a record-setting 60 home runs. Even if a few of those tales will be familiar in their details, the ever-popular Bryson “gives the events of 85 years ago so much polish and sparkle that they cannot help holding your interest.”

Bryson’s subject isn’t really one year or its relative importance, said Patrick T. Reardon in the Chicago Tribune. “It’s human nature in all its odd and amazing array.” Who remembers, for instance, that boxer Gene Tunney regularly carried highbrow books under his arm to impress fans with his intellect? Or that the anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti wore football uniforms to their trial? Bryson is most interesting when detailing what people in 1927 were paying attention to, said Susannah Nesmith in The Miami Herald. Frequently, it wasn’t what made the history books. The Sacco and Vanzetti trial received less press than a wife who murdered her husband with the weight from a window sash. And Zane Grey’s Westerns easily outsold the now canonical 1920s novels of Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Lindbergh’s flight did rivet the nation, though. In Bryson’s view, that event and Hollywood’s introduction of talking motion pictures signaled the arrival of America as the world’s dominant culture.

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But Bryson’s engagement with the past is so dumbed down that it “does a disservice to the very word ‘history,’” said Douglas Brinkley in The Washington Post. He offers zero analysis about why most of these events matter, and has merely pulled trivia from other histories, then used “stale clichés” to string his baubles together. But this “jolly jalopy ride of a book” isn’t trying to replace deeper histories, said Erica Wagner in the Financial Times. Its final section touts sources for “further reading,” and as I interpret the intent, “Bryson would be happy for you to read them.”