One Summer: America, 1927 / Bill Bryson

The summer of 1927 was a momentous one in America. It was a year that saw the United States on the cusp of greatness. Charles Lindbergh’s historic trans Atlantic flight helped to make the US the undisputed leader in aviation (whereas previously it was just trying to play catch-up with Europe). Movie palaces were being built with a luxury to rival Versailles, newspapers boasted record subscriptions, but radio was quickly becoming a force to be reckoned with, and the earliest primitive experiments with television were being conducted. Babe Ruth was creating a legend in the sports world, and Al Capone was becoming a legend of a different kind in prohibition-era crime-fueled Chicago. Sacco and Vanzetti were executed in a controversial case, highlighting anarchist and anti-immigrant tendencies in the country at large. Henry Ford abruptly ceased production of the Model T without having another replacement model in production, almost bankrupting the Ford Motor Company with this ill-advised changeover plan. It was a pretty amazing summer in United States history.

Bill Bryson has the knack for collecting facts and delivering them with his folksy and humorous delivery. He may not be a historian, but this snapshot of American history is a fascinating one.

Downloaded this one from the library!

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Here we are / Graham Swift

This short novel offers a nostalgic look at England in the 1940s and 1950s. Evie, having just lost her husband after a long marriage, looks back at the fateful summer when they met up at the pleasure palace at the end of the Brighton pier. Evie was meant to marry someone else, Ronnie Doane, aka “The Great Pablo,” a magician whose talents really pull in the crowds in the days before television kept people in their front rooms (and to whom she serves as the feather-plumed magician’s assistant). The novel tells of Ronnie’s back story as a London child war evacuee, whose second family in Oxford is so nurturing and loving that he is conflicted about going back to his real home when the war is over. But Evie marries Jack instead and is ghosted (quite literally) by Ronnie even in her final years of life. A wonderful story about people and relationships.

And the Mountains Echoed / Khaled Hosseini

The latest book by the author of The Kite Runner reads like a collection of short stories, but they are all interconnected. The link between stories isn’t always immediately apparent and there are some diversions that take the reader far from Kabul, and sometimes confusingly so (the detour to Greece was interesting, but a bit disconnected from the rest of the storyline, I thought). There were some great narratives—one in particular that I think was worth the whole of the book— a story about Afghani-American cousins, Idris and Timur, who return to Kabul to attempt to regain an ancestral home, abandoned after the Soviet invasion. While Timur goes out and carouses and flaunts his American wealth, Idris spends most of his time showing charity to a young girl in hospital, a victim of an unspeakable act of violence which leaves her in need of surgery in a western nation. Idris, himself a doctor, promises to arrange the needed medical intervention, but when he returns to the US, the...

Transient Desires / Donna Leon

Book 30 of the Guido Brunetti mystery series. I haven’t read them all, but enough to enjoy a visit back with a familiar character in a setting I love. Two female American college students are left wounded and unconscious outside the hospital emergency room in the middle of the night. Brunetti soon discovers who left them there, but the question remains why? The plot involves a nephew indebted to his criminal and abusive uncle, and illegal human trafficking. The book ends rather abruptly, and you may get the sense that after twenty-nine installments of the series, the author might just be phoning it in. Nevertheless, this book represented a nice little trip back to a Venice where real people live and work, and this to me is never a waste of time. I downloaded this to my iPad.

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