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Author | Bill Bryson |
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Country | United Kingdom |
Genre | History, non-fiction |
Publisher | Doubleday |
Publication date | October 2013 |
Media type | Hardcover, paperback, e-book |
Pages | 528 |
ISBN | 978-0767919401 |
OCLC | 841198242 |
One Summer: America, 1927 is a 2013 history book by Bill Bryson. The book is a history of the summer of 1927 in the United States. It was published in October 2013 by Doubleday. The book focuses on various key events of that summer as lenses through which to view American life: what it had recently been and what it was becoming.
The events covered include the nonstop transatlantic flight of Charles Lindbergh; the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927; the unusual season played by Babe Ruth and the rest of the 1927 New York Yankees; the transition from the Ford Model T to the new Model A; the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti; the presidency of Calvin Coolidge; and the advent of the talking-picture era with the release of The Jazz Singer .
One of the themes explored is the contrast between the Roaring Twenties of the time, and the looming Great Depression. For example, the rapid rise and equally rapid fall of the business empire of the Van Sweringen brothers is discussed, with its glimpses of future suburbia (at Shaker Heights, Ohio) and future shopping malls (at Union Terminal), as well as the brothers' eventual death in poverty. Also briefly discussed is the rise and fall of Charles Ponzi's postal coupon business, the original Ponzi scheme. The primary focus of the book, however, is on daily life, and popular culture during that summer, such as daredevil flying, the party life of sports stars, the habits of eccentric geniuses, and what people did during hot times when air conditioning was unknown except as a scarce luxury at a few theaters and hotels.
The focus on a particular moment in history as a means to explore the wider world parallels Bryson's previous book, 2010's At Home: A Short History of Private Life , which used a particular place on Earth (a parson's house in England) as a home base from which to explore a broader subject. Both books note a singular coalescence of coincidences or turning points in a particular year (At Home, 1851; One Summer, 1927).
These location-centered and timepoint-centered approaches offer a contrast to 2003's A Short History of Nearly Everything , which used a diametrically opposite approach, sweeping widely across time, distance, and scale. All of the books share the common theme that they help the reader to understand life and the universe as integrated wholes and yet simultaneously as variegated collections of details.
Bryson does not address himself solely to American readers. For example, Babe Ruth and baseball are a major topic of the book, and Bryson gives useful explanations of this American game and its terminology. [1]
George Herman "Babe" Ruth was an American professional baseball player whose career in Major League Baseball (MLB) spanned 22 seasons, from 1914 through 1935. Nicknamed "the Bambino" and "the Sultan of Swat", he began his MLB career as a star left-handed pitcher for the Boston Red Sox, but achieved his greatest fame as a slugging outfielder for the New York Yankees. Ruth is regarded as one of the greatest sports heroes in American culture and is considered by many to be the greatest baseball player of all time. In 1936, Ruth was elected into the Baseball Hall of Fame as one of its "first five" inaugural members.
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New Criticism was a formalist movement in literary theory that dominated American literary criticism in the middle decades of the 20th century. It emphasized close reading, particularly of poetry, to discover how a work of literature functioned as a self-contained, self-referential aesthetic object. The movement derived its name from John Crowe Ransom's 1941 book The New Criticism.
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Konstantin Georgiyevich Paustovsky was a Soviet writer nominated for the Nobel Prize for literature in 1965.
Babe Ruth's called shot is the home run hit by Babe Ruth of the New York Yankees against the Chicago Cubs in the fifth inning of Game 3 of the 1932 World Series, held on October 1, 1932, at Wrigley Field in Chicago. During the at-bat, Ruth made a pointing gesture which the existing film confirms, but whether he was promising a home run, or gesturing at fans or the Cubs in their dugout, remains in dispute.
Big History is an academic discipline which examines history from the Big Bang to the present. Big History resists specialization, and searches for universal patterns or trends. It examines long time frames using a multidisciplinary approach based on combining numerous disciplines from science and the humanities, and explores human existence in the context of this bigger picture. It integrates studies of the cosmos, Earth, life, and humanity using empirical evidence to explore cause-and-effect relations, and is taught at universities and primary and secondary schools often using web-based interactive presentations.
Mosquitoes is a satiric novel by the American author William Faulkner. The book was first published in 1927 by the New York-based publishing house Boni & Liveright and is the author's second novel. Sources conflict regarding whether Faulkner wrote Mosquitoes during his time living in Paris, beginning in 1925 or in Pascagoula, Mississippi in the summer of 1926. It is, however, widely agreed upon that not only its setting, but also its content clearly reference Faulkner's personal involvement in the New Orleans creative community where he spent time before moving to France.
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Color analysis, also known as personal color analysis (PCA), seasonal color analysis, or skin-tone matching, is a term often used within the cosmetics and fashion industry to describe a method of determining the colors of clothing, makeup, hair style that harmonizes with a person's skin complexion, eye color, and hair color for use in wardrobe planning and style consulting. It is generally agreed that the wrong colors will draw attention to such flaws as wrinkles or uneven skin tone while harmonious colors will enhance the natural beauty of the individual making them appear healthy, brighter, and possible more attractive or put-together.
At Home: A Short History of Private Life is a history of domestic life written by Bill Bryson. It was published in May 2010. The book covers topics of the commerce, architecture, technology and geography that have shaped homes into what they are today, told through a series of "tours" through Bryson's Norfolk rectory that quickly digress into the history of each particular room.
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Childbirth and Authoritative Knowledge: Cross-Cultural Perspectives is a collection of anthropological essays that study birth and authoritative knowledge across sixteen different cultures that was first published in 1998 in the Journal of Gender Studies. It "extends and enriches" anthropologist Brigitte Jordan's work in the anthropology of birth. In 2003, it won the Council on Anthropology and Reproduction book award.
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