National Perspective: Our national summer is waning

For most parts of the country, this has been a splendid summer, full of sunshine and sunscreen, the weather a welcome contrast to the political climate. Americans have flocked to the shore and the lakeside, wandered among the hills, lingered well after sunset at the state park or the backyard barbecue grill.

None of us alive can remember what the late historian David Fromkin called "the hot, sun-drenched, gorgeous summer of 1914, the most beautiful within memory." In "Europe's Last Summer," his 2004 masterpiece about the coming of the catastrophe of World War I, he wrote the season "was remembered by many Europeans as a kind of Eden." The Austrian novelist Stefan Zweig, perhaps the most popular literary figure of his time in all of Europe, said he could hardly remember a summer "more luxuriant, more beautiful, and, I am tempered to say, more summery."