{"product_id":"one-summer-isbn-9780375434327","title":"One Summer","description":"\u003cb\u003eA \u003ci\u003eChicago Tribune\u003c\/i\u003e Noteworthy Book\u003cbr\u003eA GoodReads Reader's Choice\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn \u003ci\u003eOne Summer\u003c\/i\u003e Bill Bryson, one of our greatest and most beloved nonfiction writers, transports readers on a journey back to one amazing season in American life.\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe 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. 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. 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. Alvin “Shipwreck” Kelly sat atop a flagpole in Newark, New Jersey, for twelve days—a new record. The American South was clobbered by unprecedented rain and by flooding of the Mississippi basin, a great human disaster, the relief efforts for which were guided by the uncannily able and insufferably pompous Herbert Hoover. Calvin Coolidge interrupted an already leisurely presidency for an even more relaxing three-month vacation in the Black Hills of South Dakota. The gangster Al Capone tightened his grip on the illegal booze business through a gaudy and murderous reign of terror and municipal corruption. The first true “talking picture,” Al Jolson’s \u003ci\u003eThe Jazz Singer\u003c\/i\u003e, was filmed and forever changed the motion picture industry. The four most powerful central bankers on earth met in secret session on a Long Island estate and made a fateful decision that virtually guaranteed a future crash and depression.\u003cbr\u003e     All this and much, much more transpired in that epochal summer of 1927, and Bill Bryson captures its outsized personalities, exciting events, and occasional just plain weirdness with his trademark vividness, eye for telling detail, and delicious humor. In that year America stepped out onto the world stage as the main event, and \u003ci\u003eOne Summer\u003c\/i\u003e transforms it all into narrative nonfiction of the highest order.\"Bryson writes in a style as effervescent as the time itself... A wonderful romp.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e—\u003ci\u003eThe New York Times\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"...A skillful lesson on the dynamics and personalities that shaped today's America and on how far the country has evolved from a gaudy era fondly but imperfectly recalled.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e—\u003ci\u003eWall Street Journal\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"There are two kinds of readers: those who love Bill Bryson and those who haven't met him yet... Colorful, rollicking and sweet, this is Bryson being Bryson. Which is to say: marvelous.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e—\u003ci\u003ePeople\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"A glorious look at one summer in America...Bryson offers delicious detail and breathtaking suspense about events whose outcomes are already known.\"\u003cbr\u003e—\u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003eBooklist\u003c\/i\u003e, Starred Review\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\"This splendid book, written in the breezy and humorous style that has come to be Bryson's trademark, is sure to delight readers steeped in the history of the period as well as those looking to acquaint themselves with it for the first time.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e—The Associated Press\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Bryson will set you right in this canter through one summer of one year that—once you’ve turned the final page—will seem more critical to American history than you might have reckoned before… [He] is a master of the sidelong, a man who can turn obscurity into hilarity with seemingly effortless charm—and \u003ci\u003eOne Summer\u003c\/i\u003e is an entertaining addition to a body of work that is at its best when it celebrates the unexpected and the obscure… This is a jolly jalopy ride of a book; Bryson runs down the byways of American history and finds diversion in every roadside stop.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e—\u003ci\u003eFinancial Times\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\"...Bryson himself is captivated by the events of summer, 1927. And why not? They included Charles Lindbergh's solo flight over the Atlantic, Sacco and Vanzetti's execution, Gutzon Borglum's start on the sculpting of Mt. Rushmore, the Dempsey-Carpentier fight, and Babe Ruth's 60 home runs—all of which Bryson covers in characteristically sparkling prose.\"\u003cbr\u003e—\u003ci\u003e\u003cb\u003ePublishers Weekly\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\"As a historian, Bryson is the antithesis of stuffy. He's a storyteller, pure and simple, and\u003ci\u003e One Summer\u003c\/i\u003e is a collection of a great many tales about people and events, centered on (but not limited to) a single season in a single year... Bryson could have written a book just as interesting about the summer of 1949 or 1913. That's because his subject isn't really a year. It's human nature in all its odd and amazing array.\"\u003cbr\u003e—\u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003eChicago Tribune\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"The book's strength is in showing the overlap of significant events and the interaction of personalities.\"\u003cbr\u003e—\u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003eLibrary Journal\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"What comes across clearest in Bryson’s lucid, lighthearted narrative is the pure energy and crazed optimism of the era. Sure, the rollicking party would end, but it was fun while it lasted—as is Bryson’s \u003ci\u003eOne Summer\u003c\/i\u003e.”\u003cbr\u003e—\u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003eMinneapolis Star-Tribune\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"...\u003ci\u003eOne Summer\u003c\/i\u003e wins you over by the sheer weigh tof its encyclopedic enthusiasms.\"\u003cbr\u003e—\u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003eThe Telegraph\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Bryson is a marvelous historian, not only exhaustively accurate, but highly entertaining. If you avoid textbook histories because they seem too dry, pick up \u003ci\u003eOne Summer\u003c\/i\u003e, or any other of Mr. Bryson's books. They are intelligent delights.\" \u003cbr\u003e—\u003cb\u003eLiz Smith, \u003ci\u003eThe Huffington Post\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Highly recommend \u003ci\u003eOne Summer: America, 1927\u003c\/i\u003e by Bill Bryson—interesting, entertaining visit to an incredible year.\"\u003cbr\u003e—\u003cb\u003eJohn McCain\u003c\/b\u003eBILL BRYSON's best-selling books include \u003ci\u003eA Walk in the Woods\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eI'm a Stranger Here Myself\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eIn a Sunburned Country\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eA Short History of Nearly Everything\u003c\/i\u003e (which earned him the 2004 Aventis Prize), \u003ci\u003eThe Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid\u003c\/i\u003e, and \u003ci\u003eAt Home\u003c\/i\u003e. He lives in England with his wife and children.\u003ci\u003eExcerpted from the Hardcover Edition \u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e1\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eTen days before he became so famous that crowds would form  around any building that contained him and waiters would fight over a  corncob left on his dinner plate, no one had heard of Charles Lindbergh.  The New York Times had mentioned him once, in the context of the coming  Atlantic flights. It had misspelled his name.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe news that  transfixed the nation as spring gave way to summer in 1927 was a  gruesome murder in a modest family home on Long Island, coincidentally  quite close to Roosevelt Field, where the Atlantic fliers were now  gathering. The newspapers, much excited, called it the Sash Weight  Murder Case.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe story was this: Late on the night of March 20,  1927, as Mr. and Mrs. Albert Snyder slept side by side in twin beds in  their house on 222nd Street in a quiet, ­middle-­class neighborhood of  Queens Village, Mrs. Snyder heard noises in the upstairs hallway. Going  to investigate, she found a large ­man—­a “giant,” she told  ­police—­just outside her bedroom door. He was speaking in a foreign  accent to another man, whom she could not see. Before Mrs. Snyder could  react, the giant seized her and beat her so roughly that she was left  unconscious for six hours. Then he and his confederate went to Mr.  Snyder’s bed, strangled the poor man with picture wire, and stove in his  head with a sash weight. It was the sash weight that fired the public’s  imagination and gave the case its name. The two villains then turned  out drawers all over the house and fled with Mrs. Snyder’s jewels, but  they left a clue to their identity in the form of an ­Italian-­language  newspaper on a table downstairs.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe New York Times the next day was fascinated but confused. In a big page-one headline it reported:\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eArt Editor Is Slain in Bed;\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e  Wife Tied, Home Searched;\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e  Motive Mystifies Police\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe  story noted that a Dr. Vincent Juster from St. Mary Immaculate Hospital  had examined Mrs. Snyder and ­couldn’t find any bump on her that would  explain her six hours of unconsciousness. Indeed, he ­couldn’t find any  injuries on her at all. Perhaps, he suggested tentatively, it was the  trauma of the event rather than actual injury that accounted for her  prolonged collapse.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003ePolice detectives by this time, however, were  more suspicious than confused. For one thing, the Snyder house showed  no sign of forced entry, and in any case it was an oddly modest target  for murderous jewel thieves. The detectives found it curious, too, that  Albert Snyder had slept through a violent scuffle just outside his door.  The Snyders’ ­nine-­year-­old daughter, Lorraine, in a room across the  hall, had also heard nothing. It also seemed strange that burglars would  break into a house and evidently pause to read an anarchist newspaper  before placing it neatly on a table and proceeding upstairs. Oddest of  all, Mrs. Snyder’s ­bed—­the one from which she had arisen to  investigate the noise in the ­hallway—­was tidily made, as if it had not  been slept in. She was unable to account for this, citing her  concussion. As the detectives puzzled over these anomalies, one of them  idly lifted a corner of mattress on Mrs. Snyder’s bed and there revealed  the jewels that she had reported stolen.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAll eyes turned to  Ruth. She met the detectives’ gazes uncertainly, then broke down and  confessed the ­crime—­but blamed it all on a brute named Judd Gray, her  secret lover. Ruth Snyder was placed under arrest, a search was begun  for Judd Gray, and the ­newspaper-­reading public of America was about  to become uncommonly excited.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe 1920s was a great time for  reading ­altogether—­very possibly the peak decade for reading in  American life. Soon it would be overtaken by the passive distractions of  radio, but for the moment reading remained most people’s principal  method for filling idle time. Each year, American publishers produced  110 million books, more than 10,000 separate titles, double the number  of ten years before. For those who felt daunted by such a welter of  literary possibility, a helpful new phenomenon, the book club, had just  made its debut. The ­Book-­of-­the-­Month Club was founded in 1926 and  was followed the next year by the Literary Guild. Both were immediately  successful. Authors were venerated in a way that seems scarcely possible  now. When Sinclair Lewis returned home to Minnesota to work on his  novel Elmer Gantry (published in the spring of 1927), people came from  miles around just to look at him.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eMagazines boomed, too.  Advertising revenues leaped 500 percent in the decade, and many  publications of lasting importance made their debut: Reader’s Digest in  1922, Time in 1923, the American Mercury and Smart Set in 1924, The New  Yorker in 1925. Time was perhaps the most immediately influential.  Founded by two former Yale classmates, Henry Luce and Briton Hadden, it  was very popular but wildly inaccurate. It described Charles Nungesser,  for instance, as having “lost an arm, a leg, a chin” during the war,  which was not merely incorrect in all particulars but visibly so since  Nungesser could be seen every day in newspaper photographs with a full  set of limbs and an incontestably bechinned face. Time was noted for its  repetitious devotion to certain ­words—­swart, nimble,  ­gimlet-­eyed—­and to squashed neologisms like cinemaddict and  cinemactress. It also had a fondness for odd, distorted phrases, so that  “in the nick of time” became, without embarrassment, “in ­time’s nick.”  Above all, it had a curious Germanic affection for inverting normal  word order and packing as many nouns, adjectives, and adverbs as  possible into a sentence before bringing in a ­verb—­or as Wolcott Gibbs  put it in a famous New Yorker profile of Luce, “Backward ran the  sentences until reeled the mind.” Despite their ­up-­to-­the-­minute  swagger, Luce and Hadden were deeply conservative. They would not, for  instance, employ women for any job above the level of secretary or  office assistant.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAbove all, the 1920s was a golden age for  newspapers. Newspaper sales in the decade rose by about a fifth, to 36  million copies a ­day—­or 1.4 newspapers for every household. New York  City alone had twelve daily papers, and almost all other cities worthy  of the name had at least two or three. More than this, in many cities  readers could get their news from a new, revolutionary type of  publication that completely changed people’s expectations of what daily  news should ­be—­the tabloid. Tabloids focused on crime, sports, and  celebrity gossip, and in so doing gave all three an importance  considerably beyond any they had enjoyed before. A study in 1927 showed  that tabloids devoted between a quarter and a third of their space to  crime reports, up to ten times more than the serious papers did. It was  because of their influence that the quiet but messy murder of a man like  Albert Snyder could become national news.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe tabloid, both as a  format and as a way of distilling news down to its salacious essence,  had been around for a quarter of a century in ­En­gland, but no one had  thought to try it in the United States until two young members of the  Chicago Tribune publishing family, Robert R. McCormick and his cousin  Joseph Patterson, saw London’s Daily Mirror while serving in ­En­gland  during World War I and decided to offer something similar at home when  peace came. The result was the Illustrated Daily News, launched in New  York in June 1919, price 2 cents. The concept was not an immediate  ­hit—­circulation at one point was just eleven ­thousand—­but gradually  the Daily News built a devoted following and by the ­mid-­1920s it was  far and away the ­best-­selling newspaper in the country, with a  circulation of one million, more than double that of the New York Times.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eSuch  success inevitably inspired imitators. First came the New York Daily  Mirror from William Randolph Hearst in June 1924, followed three months  later by the wondrously dreadful Evening Graphic. The Graphic was the  creation of an eccentric, ­bushy-­haired businessman named Bernarr  Macfadden, who had started life rather more prosaically some fifty years  earlier as a Missouri farmboy named Bernard MacFadden. Macfadden, as he  now styled himself, was a man of strong and exotic beliefs. He ­didn’t  like doctors, lawyers, or clothing. He was powerfully devoted to  bodybuilding, vegetarianism, the rights of commuters to a decent  railroad service, and getting naked. He and his wife frequently bemused  their neighbors in Englewood, New ­Jersey—­among them Dwight Morrow, a  figure of some centrality to this story, as will become ­apparent—­by  exercising naked on the lawn. Macfadden’s commitment to healthfulness  was so total that when one of his daughters died of a heart condition he  remarked: “It’s better she’s gone. She’d only have disgraced me.” Well  into his eighties he could be seen walking around Manhattan carrying a  ­forty-­pound bag of sand on his back as a way of keeping fit. He lived  to be ­eighty-­seven.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAs a businessman, he seems to have  dedicated his life to the proposition that where selling to the public  is concerned no idea is too stupid. He built three separate fortunes.  The first was as the inventor of a cult science he called  Physcultopathy, which featured strict adherence to his principles of  vegetarianism and strength through bodybuilding, with forays into  nakedness for those who dared. The movement produced a chain of  successful health farms and related publications. In 1919, as an  outgrowth of the latter, Macfadden came up with an even more inspired  invention: the confession magazine. True Story, the flagship of this  side of his operations, soon had monthly sales of 2.2 million. All the  stories in True Story were candid and juicy, with “a yeasty undercurrent  of sexual excitation,” in the words of one satisfied observer. It was  Macfadden’s proud boast that not a word in True Story was fabricated.  This claim caused Macfadden a certain amount of financial discomfort  when a piece in 1927 called “The Revealing Kiss,” set in Scranton,  Pennsylvania, turned out, by unfortunate chance, to contain the names of  eight respectable citizens of that fair city. They sued, and Macfadden  was forced to admit that True Stories’ stories were not in fact true at  all and never had been.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWhen tabloids became the rage, Macfadden  launched the Evening Graphic. Its most distinguishing feature was that  it had almost no attachment to truth or even, often, a recognizable  reality. It conducted imaginary interviews with people it had not met  and ran stories by figures who could not possibly have written them.  When Rudolph Valentino died in 1926, it produced a series of articles by  him from beyond the grave. The Graphic became famous for a form of  illustration of its own invention called the composograph, in which the  faces of newsworthy figures were superimposed on the bodies of models  who had been posed on sets to create arresting tableaux. The most  celebrated of these visual creations came during annulment proceedings,  earlier in 1927, between Edward W. “Daddy” Browning and his young and  dazzlingly erratic bride, affectionately known to all as Peaches, when  the Graphic ran a photo showing (without any real attempt at  plausibility) Peaches standing naked in the witness box. The Graphic  sold an extra 250,000 copies that day. The New Yorker called the Graphic  a “grotesque fungus,” but it was a phenomenally successful fungus. By  1927, its circulation was nearing six hundred thousand.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eFor  conventional newspapers, these were serious and worrying numbers. Most  responded by becoming conspicuously more like tabloids themselves, in  spirit if not presentation. Even the New York Times, though still  devotedly solemn and gray, found room for plenty of juicy stories  throughout the decade and covered them with prose that was often nearly  as feverish. So now when a murder like that of Albert Snyder came along,  the result across all newspapers was something like a frenzy.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIt  hardly mattered that the perpetrators were spectacularly ­inept—­so  much so that the writer Damon Runyon dubbed it the Dumbbell Murder  ­Case—­or that they were not particularly attractive or imaginative. It  was enough that the case involved lust, infidelity, a heartless woman,  and a sash weight. These were the things that sold newspapers. The  ­Snyder-­Gray case received more column inches of coverage than any  other crime of the era, and was not exceeded for column inches until the  trial of Bruno Hauptmann for the kidnapping of Charles Lindbergh’s baby  in 1935. In terms of its effect on popular culture, even the Lindbergh  kidnapping ­couldn’t touch it.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eTrials in 1920s America were often  amazingly speedy. Judd Gray and Ruth Snyder were arraigned, indicted by  a grand jury, and in the dock barely a month after their arrest. A  carnival atmosphere descended on the Queens County Courthouse, a  building of classical grandeur in Long Island City. A hundred and thirty  newspapers from across the nation and as far afield as Norway sent  reporters. Western Union installed the biggest switchboard it had ever  ­built—­bigger than any used for a presidential convention or World  Series. Outside the courthouse, lunch wagons set up along the curb and  souvenir sellers sold stickpins in the shape of sash weights for ten  cents each. Throngs of people turned up daily hoping to get seats  inside. Those who failed seemed content to stand outside and stare at  the building knowing that important matters that they could not see or  hear were being decided within. People of wealth and fashion turned up,  too, among them the Marquess of Queensberry and the unidentified wife of  a U.S. Supreme Court justice.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThose fortunate enough to get  seats inside were allowed to come forward at the conclusion of  proceedings each day and inspect the venerated exhibits in the  ­case—­the sash weight, picture wire, and bottle of chloroform that  featured in the evil deed. The News and Mirror ran as many as eight  articles a day on the trial. If any especially riveting disclosures  emerged during the ­day—­that, for instance, Ruth Snyder on the night of  the murder had received Judd Gray in a ­blood-­red ­kimono—­special  editions were rushed into print, as if war had been declared. For those  too eager or overcome to focus on the words, the Mirror provided 160  photographs, diagrams, and other illustrations during the three weeks of  the trial, the Daily News nearer 200. For a short while, one of ­Gray’s  lawyers was one Edward Reilly, who would later gain notoriety by  defending Bruno Richard Hauptmann in the Lindbergh baby kidnapping  trial, but Reilly, who was a hopeless drunk, was fired or resigned at an  early stage.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eEach day for three weeks, jurors, reporters, and  audience listened in rapt silence as the tragic arc of Albert Snyder’s  mortal fall was outlined. The story had begun ten years earlier when  Snyder, the lonely, balding art editor of Motor Boating magazine, had  developed an infatuation with an office secretary of high spirits and  light intellect named Ruth Brown. She was thirteen years his junior and  not notably attracted to him, but when, after their third or fourth  date, he offered her a ­gumball-­sized engagement ring her modest  defenses crumbled. “I just ­couldn’t give up that ring,” she explained  helplessly to a friend.","brand":"Random House Large Print","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46304723697893,"sku":"NP9780375434327","price":34.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780375434327.jpg?v=1767734205","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/products\/one-summer-isbn-9780375434327","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}