Just finished Bill Bryson's One Summer: America, 1927. As usual, very entertaining. Bryson has a knack of organising his subject material in a way that makes you smile even as you are informed of something you didn't know. Which is a lot, in my case. Anyway, enough of sentence fragments!

As strongly hinted at in the title, One Summer explores events and people in a year that Bryson contends is a kind of seminal one for the emergence of the United States as a cultural and technological power. We already know that the US emerged from the Great War as a political and economic heavyweight, factors which necessarily background the book. Here Bryson weaves the stories of famous Americans (such as Lindbergh, Coolidge, Capone and Babe Ruth) with a sense of what was in vogue or newsworthy or downright scandalous at the time. The skill is not only in creating engaging vignettes and coherent stories, but in bringing the whole together over the "summer" of 1927. The stories are governed by the timeline - not being entities in themselves, but rather interwoven with each other. For some readers who prefer stories to stand as independent through-narratives, this may be a challenge. But I found that the wait was almost always worth it.