1920: The Year That Made The Decade Roar by Eric Burns
https://books.google.com/books/about/1920.html?id=Zn-RrgEACAAJ
The best way to get me to read a book is to titled it with a year. Unfortunately Eric Burns’s book, 1920: The Year That Made the Decade Roar, fails to be about a year rather than a rough breeze on what the decade was about.
First the format of the book is a problem. You would think that a book about a year would be in terms of the narrative from beginning to the end, for example, chapter one would be the January and the last chapter of the book would be like the last week of December. But no, Burns does not do this. He does not even separate chapters with their respected events/topics. He starts the book with a the 1st Red Scare but then leaves to discuss something in chapter two. He returns to the 1st Red Scare two more times in two different chapters. Really there is reason for this and really should have been done in one whole chapter.
Perhaps this can be forgiven if the information Burns offers was good but it really isn’t. Much of the information given can be found in any typical American history book or survey. The little good information might be relevant only to historians or history buffs but there isn’t any major discovery, theme, or thesis in this book. Really this book felt like Burns wanted to about the whole decade of the 1920s but this project got out of hand and was too much of an effort to write so he decided to only write about 1920. But with each topic that he writes on, it really is only a minor mention or event that occurred in 1920 that ties into some big event or person that took place in the late 1920s.
Really this book feels like it is saying look at all these random things that happened in 1920. Really feels like a bunch of unsorted information in a book without a thesis or much to say. Really a shame, since there is potential for this book as it feels like a rough draft made before the final draft. I wouldn’t brother with this book.
