‘It was a lot more fun to get famous than to be famous…’
Bill Bryson’s greatest strength as a writer is to take a topic that would probably be considered quite niche (the house of a Victorian parson, the Appalachian Trail) and render it universal. Whether tackling something or someone very specific such as William Shakespeare or providing a treatise on… well… everything, as he did in A Short History of Nearly Everything, Bryson’s writing remains accessible, informative, and, above all, entertaining…
One Summer: America, 1927 sees Bryson use that fateful summer as a means to explore the transition from the Roaring Twenties into the looming Great Depression through such figures as varied and disparate as Charles Lindbergh, Babe Ruth and Henry Ford. As with much of Bryson’s work, this novel often feels meandering, rambling even, but, as ever, he always finds his way home eventually, and when the links between the different described events begin to reveal themselves, One Summer becomes very satisfying indeed.
While this book would rank pretty low on my all-time Bryson list, that is more of a reflection of how good his other stuff is, and how the subject matter here just isn’t quite to my taste, which probably explains why this is one of the only books in his oeuvre that I still had left to read.