ONE SUMMER: AMERICA 1927

Bill Bryson's 2006 memoir, THE LIFE AND TIMES OF THE THUNDERBOLT KID, about growing up in Des Moines, Iowa in the 1950s, is one of the funniest books I've ever read. We're talking laugh-out-loud, milk-spewing-out-of-your-nose funny. I read most of it on a plane flight to and from New Orleans and I'm sure many of my fellow passengers wished the guy with the window seat would stop braying like a jackass. If you haven't read THUNDERBOLT, you should do so by all means. Highly recommended.

Bryson's 2013 popular history ONE SUMMER: AMERICA 1927 came highly recommended and it's easy to see why. This rollicking, kaleidoscopic overview of the events and people of that long gone summer is full of rich, colorful stories, (some vignettes, some longer) that recount how that one long, wild, miraculous summer captured our collective imaginations then and now.

What's in it? A better question would be what's not. In over 400 pages of delightful, crisp, clean prose, Bryson vividly recounts the following: Babe Ruth hit sixty home runs, the Federal Reserve made the mistake that precipitated the stock market crash, Al Capone enjoyed his last summer of eminence, THE JAZZ SINGER was filmed, television was created, radio came of age, Sacco and Vanzetti were executed, President Coolidge chose not to run,work began on Mount Rushmore, the Mississippi River flooded as it never had before, a madman in Michigan blew up a school and killed forty-four people in the worst slaughter of children in American history, Henry Ford stopped making the Model T and promised to stop insulting Jews and a kid from Minnesota flew across an ocean and captivated the planet in a way it had never been captivated before.

All of these things and more are brought to life in ONE SUMMER. Bryson devotes more pages to Lindbergh and Ruth and their respective accomplishments than any other figures in the book but that's okay, given their monumental achievements. Bryson gives short shrift to legendary pulp fiction writer Edgar Rice Burroughs, a storyteller, who, despite his flaws, his still read today more than one hundred years since his first book was published.  All in all, ONE SUMMER is a terrific read, entertaining, informative, funny in places, tragic in others.

But then there's this. In a recounting of how DRACULA was brought to the American stage, Bryson states: "It was also the making of Bela Lugosi, who devoted the rest of his career to playing Dracula. He starred in the 1931 movie and a great number of sequels. He also changed wives often-he was married five times-and became addicted to narcotics, but professionally he did almost nothing else for almost thirty years. Such was his devotion to the role that when he died in 1956, he was buried dressed as Count Dracula"

Where do I begin to address the lies in that paragraph? For starters, there was only one sequel to the 1931 DRACULA. It was DRACULA'S DAUGHTER (1936) and it did not star Lugosi. In fact, Lugosi only played Dracula on screen once more in ABBOTT AND COSTELLO MEET FRANKENSTEIN in 1948. As for doing "almost nothing else for almost thirty years", consider this partial filmography of some of Lugosi's best known horror films: MURDERS IN THE RUE MORGUE (1932), WHITE ZOMBIE (1932), ISLAND OF LOST SOULS (1932), THE BLACK CAT (1934), MARK OF THE VAMPIRE (1935), THE RAVEN (1935), THE INVISIBLE RAY (1936), SON OF FRANKENSTEIN (1939), THE WOLF MAN (1941), GHOST OF FRANKENSTEIN (1942), FRANKENSTEIN MEETS THE WOLF MAN (1943), RETURN OF THE VAMPIRE (1943), and THE BODY SNATCHER (1945). Lugosi made other low-budget, cheap horror films at various Poverty Row studios and ended up working with legendary filmmaker Ed Wood in his final years. And that's doing nothing?

Shame on you Bill Bryson for doing such a lazy, sloppy job of research. All of this information is just a click away. A few minutes of your time and you could have given your readers a fairer and much more accurate accounting of Lugosi's life and career. Granted, it's a small thing in the grand scheme of things but it bugs me to read something I know is wrong in a history book because it immediately puts everything else in the book, everything that I've been led to believe is correct, into doubt. If Bryson gets something like this wrong (and I know it's wrong because I'm a horror film fan), then what, pray tell, else did he get wrong in this otherwise fine book? Perhaps nothing, perhaps several things. It's hard to know for sure but one mistake, and such an egregious one as this, puts every word in ONE SUMMER into doubt.

While reading the book, I was prepared to give it a high recommendation as I really and truly enjoyed it. The Lugosi lies taint what is otherwise a worthwhile read. Read it at your own risk. Your knowledge of the various people and events in the book may be more than mine and you may find other errors.

 Or not.