For our book this month, my book group chose Bill Bryson's One Summer: America, 1927. I wasn't terribly excited until I realized who wrote it....and then I was curious about this one.
I love history but American history and modern history are not my things.... So it is an achievement that Bryson pulled me in so quickly with this work.
Bryson focuses on several personalities that made headlines that summer: Charles Lindbergh, Calvin Coolidge, Babe Ruth, Herbert Hoover, Ruth Snyder, Al Capone, Henry Ford....and many more. I'll be the first to admit that I knew these people in only general terms. But Bryson's writing style is such that I couldn't help but be curious about them all - and he gave wonderful portraits of them, while putting all the events into the context of the late 1920s.
I learned a lot from this book and I can honestly say that I only skipped over a few parts of the baseball sections. Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig had fascinating lives....but baseball statistics hold little interest for me.
This was a well-written, informative read and I highly recommend it!
No comments:
Post a Comment