Tag Archives: Bill Bryson

One Summer: America, 1927

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One Summer: America, 1927One Summer: America, 1927 by Bill Bryson

At some point, Bill Bryson apparently became interested in something that happened during the summer of 1927, probably in relation to baseball, so he did what any good writer would do and went to the library to begin reading newspapers from that period. He quickly realized that apart from Babe Ruth’s amazing season, there were lots of other incredible things happening, not least of which was Lindberg’s first solo transatlantic flight.

You can see Bryson in action as a reader himself, as he drops hints about his methodology throughout the book: he alludes to headlines and how many pages were devoted to specific stories at specific times. When characters (known or unknown today) appear, he delves into the secondary literature to place them in context.

And we are persuaded. There is no doubt about it, crazy and amazing things were happening in the summer of 1927, and Bryson’s verve and prose make this popcorn history at its best. It’s accessible, fun, engaging, and at times genuinely insightful. And it even does something important: it gives a new perspective of a different time in our nation’s history.

Of course, with any historical snapshot like this the problem is that stories keep wandering out of the frame. We get, for instance, exposes of Coolidge and Hoover and their respective administrations, as well as clues and forecasts leading up to the stock market crash, but of course most of that action and context happens off screen, as it were. When it comes down to it, the only things that are firmly within the summer appear to be baseball and the immediate aftermath of Lindberg’s flight.

Some of the things Bryson covers consists of primarily context (like the advent of talking pictures and its influence) without any conclusion (like what happened with Ford’s Model A, which Ford had shut down all production in that summer in order to create). But all of that is fine, because Bryon’s not writing a historical treatise. He’s writing a story. A story about a single summer with tons of information, tons of fantastic characters, and his familiar vantage of being pleasantly delighted and bemused with everything he’s discovering.

A Brief History of Nearly Everything

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A Short History of Nearly EverythingA Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Bill Bryson tries to do everything, and it totally pisses me off. It wouldn’t bother me so much if I could dismiss him, if what he did didn’t really matter very much or if he did it badly. But he does it with a certain curmudgeonly panache that makes it all the more irritating when he succeeds. He gets to travel to interesting places and write about how they make him cranky, which is pretty much the height of achievement for a writer. But when he takes on something like the entirety of the physical world itself in A Brief History of Nearly Everything and comes across even more genuine and reflective, I want to either give him a huge high-five or push him off a cliff.

The thing about this book, Bryson’s first work of natural history, is that it retains most of the best parts of his writing style and drops the most irritating aspects. That is, in Bryson’s travel writings I’m always annoyed at the way his cranky “get off my lawn” disposition stands in tension with a clear-eyed excitement and wonder about the places he’s going and the things he learns there. Much of this, at least in his UK work, is because he’s seen these places before, has spent much of his career trying to preserve them, and is embittered about the way they’re changing. In A Brief History, the subject matter precludes some of this personal irritation but retains his wonder about the nature of reality itself and the story of man’s investigation of it, and this to great effect.

Bryson is a writer who can pretty much—it seems—do whatever he wants. So when he came to the realization that he didn’t know much about the natural history of the planet he’s spend a career traveling around on, no one told him that he didn’t have the training or the background to write a compelling treatment. He just started reading books and talking to specialists, and A Brief History is what we got. Despite my expectations returning to the book after nearly a decade and a PhD later, I think he largely succeeds.

Now, of course there are errors and misrepresentations. Any specialist reading a book in which Bryson tries to cover so much ground is going to find one or two. At one point, for instance, Bryson causally mentions a distance to Betelgeuse that I think is off by an order of magnitude. But in general terms, he does a remarkably good job of taking a non-specialist on a tour of the physical world, through space and time but focusing primarily on our own planet and our own (sometimes misguided) attempts to understand it, highlighting all the while just how amazing it all is. And, of course, because it’s Bryson, all the weirdness and randomness and strange stories involved in the (largely male) folks who figured this stuff out figure prominently.

Of course, that approach lends itself to certain pitfalls in writing historical treatments of science, and Bryson doesn’t avoid these. The entire work is suffused with Whiggism. That is, Bryson is interested in explaining how we “got to” our (assumedly correct) modern understanding of things. In fairness, he recognizes how much uncertainty and conjecture there is in discussion of, for instance, our early history and origins as a species. But largely, his story is a narrative of how different scientists “got it right” or “almost got it right.” What they did is interpreted with the final modern synthesis in sight. He’s not interested in understanding the context in which someone like Isaac Newton was working or evaluating his theories by their own terms and historical context; he holds them up as a modernist looking through interesting oddities, pulling old things from a drawer and laughing at how quaint certain aspects appear.

But I can forgive a lot in this work, because there are so many interesting things to bring to light and Bryson still does such a great job of unearthing them. He admits that his work is in no way a standardized, authoritative, or comprehensive treatment. It’s not a textbook, and a different writer would have pulled out different interesting bits. Rather, as with Bryson’s other books, it’s a meander. But here we don’t get vignettes of Bryson falling asleep on a bus only to wake and berate the fate of a random seaside village; here we get instead a lot of genuine wonder and accessible prose leading us along into this big wide world and our long and tangled explorations of it.

The Road to Little Dribbling

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The Road to Little Dribbling: Adventures of an American in BritainThe Road to Little Dribbling: Adventures of an American in Britain by Bill Bryson

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Bill Bryson is probably the luckiest writer alive, for a few reasons.

For one thing, my wife adores him. This should give me abundant hope, as it implies that as I get older and grouchier, so as long as I remain bumbling, mildly humorous, and appropriately annoyed at the grammatical foibles of young people, she will continue to find me endearing. (She might even start reading my books.)

But he’s also lucky because the man has made a successful career of traveling about investigating interesting places and writing about what he finds. He gained all the credibility he’ll probably ever need doing this and doing this very well in his excellent articles for National Geographic. But now that he has this credibility, he can do whatever he wants with it. He can go where he pleases and season his accounts with whatever historical anecdotes strike his fancy and as much griping about litter, economic depression, or kids these days he feels inclined to include. At this point, he could conceivably return to the United States with the intention of writing a book on highway rest areas, and it would be an immediate success.

I hope it’s clear here how much I envy this guy.

Yet I also at times—and especially in this, his most recent work—find him quite frustrating. His bits of history on the places he visits, for instance, are presented without any real context. Of course, in this book he’s under no obligation as a historian or sociologist (which, to be fair, he never pretends to be) to build these observations into any thesis or use them as arguments toward anything beyond comments like “England is absurd and delightful” or “Things are getting pretty crummy here.” The Road to Little Dribbling is just Bryson ambling about Britain, sort of traveling from the far south to the far north, and also sort of retracing some of his steps from his great work, Notes from a Small Island. Really though, it’s just him being his familiar, garrulous, and somehow endearing self.

Now, Bryson has done fine work—let’s get that straight. I’m rereading his science book right now, and it’s solid. More than that, it’s written with what makes him so appealing: eyes wide with genuine wonder and delight. “This is your universe,” he says. “Pay attention.” I remember Notes from a Small Island being similar: exploring the wonder of a new and genuinely wonderful place. But a lot of that seems to be lacking in Little Dribbling. This is an older, more tired, grouchier Bryson taking us on an aimless tour with sidetracks to wait for a new baby’s arrival or attend a soccer match with the grandkids. Maybe that should make it more endearing, but instead it gives the sense that this whole thing is an afterthought, an excuse to write a book in which he can comment on whether shops have opened or closed since the last time he was in town, whether the village he’s passing through has a good high street, and how rude the clerk in the hardware store is.

In places it’s quite maddening, both for Bryson, clearly, and for the reader. It’s maddening for the reader because Bryson could do so much more. In some places, for instance his visit to Avebury, he gives wonderful and astonishing context on the standing stones. Yet in other places his comments are simply throw-away lines about certain museums being nice, pleasant, or interesting without any details. In one instance he explains the remarkable situation of the manor of a dwindling family being finally donated to the National Trust and turned into a museum and tells how some rooms hadn’t been opened for decades, but we get very little insight into what this place actually was like. (It was musty, according to Bryson.) Or where he points out the oldest public park in the world and explains that it’s a model for pretty much all other city parks, but then does nothing to actually take us there in his prose.

Maybe that’s my primary complaint. I’m used to Bryson taking me places. Here I just felt like I was getting an account of Bryson going different places and how they affected his emotional state. There’s some irony here too. Bryson apparently has become something of a patron saint for landscape conservation, walking paths, and eliminating litter in Britain. And yet in this book we spend a good deal of our time with him in the car, zipping from one sight to another, along the way getting updates about the things that annoy him about politics or culture or long expositions on the downfall of proof-reading followed by imaginary dialogue of what he’d like to tell people who are unpleasant to him.

A final complaint: we know he’s well-read, but it taxes even the most charitable reader’s patience when Bryson approaches a place like Blackpool and offers a solution to its economic and social woes in less than a page. I don’t begrudge him offering a solution, but it would be wonderful to have had some suggestions on where to dig deeper for information on Blackpool or any other interesting place Bryson finds himself. Bryson knows a thing or two about every place he visits. Where does he learn all this? He’s been my guide for the book, I’d like some guidance on where to go next to learn more. I’m not asking for footnotes or endnotes (okay, maybe I am), but at least a list of suggested reading would have been helpful.

Yes, my annoyance is probably primarily motivated by jealousy: I want to be there seeing those things and writing (or complaining) about them. In fairness, I’d likely be just as grouchy (hopefully to my wife’s delight). But I’d certainly have less credibility and undoubtably do a much poorer job than Bryson has done here.