Alvin “Shipwreck” Kelly sat atop a flagpole in Newark, New Jersey, for twelve days-a new record. 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. 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. 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. Published by Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group on ★★★★ One Summer: America, 1927 by Bill Bryson “We forget just how painfully dim the world was before electricity,” writes Bryson in “The Fuse Box” chapter.One Summer: America, 1927, by Bill Bryson He has a knack for considering historical things from the modern vantage point, making history come alive better than any textbook. Those fact-stuffed pages can sometimes make for slow reading, but since this is a nonfiction book without a plot, readers who find themselves not interested in, say, 19th-century botany, can skip to the next room and pick up, without missing much except why “guano mania” swept through England in the 1830s. Why did Henry VIII slaughter 25,000 oxen in 1513?. How many pounds of pears did the average person eat in 1851?. You can’t open a page and read a few sentences without learning something. Each chapter is named after a room or a part of the grounds (“The Drawing Room,” “The Garden,” “The Bedroom,” etc.) and used as a jumping-off point for Bryson to explore the origins of everything from electricity to ice to crop fertilizers. “At Home: A Short History of Private Life” takes readers on a journey through every room of the Victorian parsonage in England where the author lives. He’s hiked the Appalachian Trail and toured three of the seven continents in the name of book research, so Bill Bryson can be forgiven for not leaving home to write his latest.
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