After ploughing through the 500-plus pages of the latest tome to emerge from the highly entertaining pen of Bill Bryson, a reader has no option but to respond: Yes. Yes it was.
This is Bryson in top-rate form, producing an epic tale that is at once mind-numbingly broad and extremely specific in scope.
He presents the great and the good, the weird and the wonderful, the famous and the forgotten, the brilliant and the bizarre from one summer in the United States of America.
His choice for this ambitious project is 1927, a flashpoint for all manner of things cultural, economic, political, sporting and entertaining. The stories fly thick and fast just from May to September, the American summer.
We've got murderers, adventurers, baseballers, boxers, inventors, presidents, crackpots, authors, narcissists and heroes. Their impact on the era is explored, and their often-depressing fate is revealed.
What I have always liked about Bryson is his ability to tell a story with an enthusiasm that leaps off the page. He finds joy and wonderment in every corner, and unearths forgotten and overlooked tales of glory and tragedy. Presumably he has a vast team of research assistants - or possibly he enjoys hundreds of hours looking through old newspapers in libraries - because the research is exhaustive.
Dozens of men and women are profiled, but the undoubted centrepiece of One Summer is the great aviator Charles Lindbergh. His rapid transformation from pilot to arguably the most famous man in the world makes for absorbing, occasionally painful, reading.
Other well-known names, places and developments crop up in a summer that does, indeed, seem to be remarkably full of life. Babe Ruth has his greatest summer in baseball, Al Capone enjoys his ''last summer of eminence'', television is created, and work begins on Mt Rushmore.
There are riveting murder cases, a whole lot of racism and bigotry, and some exploration of a looming financial crisis that would trigger the Great Depression.
Bryson's overall theme is that this was the summer the world turned. Part history, part social commentary and part high comedy, One Summer is Bryson's finest work since Notes From A Big Country. Give the man a summer off.
- Hayden Meikle is ODT sports editor.
Win a copy
The ODT has five copies of One Summer, by Bill Bryson (RRP $54.99), to give away courtesy of Doubleday, a Random House imprint.
For your chance to win a copy, email helen.speirs@odt.co.nz with your name and postal address in the body of the email, and ''One Summer Book Competition'' in the subject line, by 5pm on Tuesday, October 29.
