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| The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid: A Memoir | 
 enlarge | Author: Bill Bryson
Publisher: Broadway
Category: Book
List Price: $14.95
Buy Used: $3.69
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Avg. Customer Rating:  62 reviews
Sales Rank: 1017
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 288
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.6
Dimensions (in): 7.9 x 5.1 x 0.8
ISBN: 0767919378
Dewey Decimal Number: 910.4092
EAN: 9780767919371
ASIN: 0767919378
Publication Date: September 25, 2007
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
From one of the most beloved and bestselling authors in the English language, a vivid, nostalgic, and utterly hilarious memoir of growing up in the 1950s
Bill Bryson was born in the middle of the American century—1951—in the middle of the United States—Des Moines, Iowa—in the middle of the largest generation in American history—the baby boomers. As one of the best and funniest writers alive, he is perfectly positioned to mine his memories of a totally all-American childhood for 24-carat memoir gold. Like millions of his generational peers, Bill Bryson grew up with a rich fantasy life as a superhero. In his case, he ran around his house and neighborhood with an old football jersey with a thunderbolt on it and a towel about his neck that served as his cape, leaping tall buildings in a single bound and vanquishing awful evildoers (and morons)—in his head—as "The Thunderbolt Kid."
Using this persona as a springboard, Bill Bryson re-creates the life of his family and his native city in the 1950s in all its transcendent normality—a life at once completely familiar to us all and as far away and unreachable as another galaxy. It was, he reminds us, a happy time, when automobiles and televisions and appliances (not to mention nuclear weapons) grew larger and more numerous with each passing year, and DDT, cigarettes, and the fallout from atmospheric testing were considered harmless or even good for you. He brings us into the life of his loving but eccentric family, including affectionate portraits of his father, a gifted sportswriter for the local paper and dedicated practitioner of isometric exercises, and OF his mother, whose job as the home furnishing editor for the same paper left her little time for practicing the domestic arts at home. The many readers of Bill Bryson’s earlier classic, A Walk in the Woods, will greet the reappearance in these pages of the immortal Stephen Katz, seen hijacking literally boxcar loads of beer. He is joined in the Bryson gallery of immortal characters by the demonically clever Willoughby brothers, who apply their scientific skills and can-do attitude to gleefully destructive ends.
Warm and laugh-out-loud funny, and full of his inimitable, pitch-perfect observations, The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid is as wondrous a book as Bill Bryson has ever written. It will enchant anyone who has ever been young.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 57 more reviews...
 Made in America's Heartland January 3, 2008
15 out of 15 found this review helpful
"Getting into the strippers' tent would become the principal preoccupation of my pubescent years." - Bill Bryson in THUNDERBOLT KID
"Essentially matinees were an invitation to four thousand children to riot for four hours in a large darkened space." - Bill Bryson in THUNDERBOLT KID
As I mature gracefully, reading the coming-of-age reminiscences of others that grew up about the same time I did - the 1950s - becomes an absorbing leisure activity. Perhaps I just need to supplement my failing memory with theirs. In any case, several fine volumes of the genre come to mind: Blooming: A Small-Town Girlhood by Susan Allen Toth, Sleeping Arrangements by Laura Shaine Cunningham, When All the World Was Young: A Memoir by Barbara Holland, and Wait Till Next Year: A Memoir by Doris Kearns Goodwin. As you may have noticed, all four of these are by female authors who are recalling their girlhood. On the other hand, THE LIFE AND TIMES OF THE THUNDERBOLT KID, by Bill Bryson, is all about boyhood. And, as I think you'll agree, boys are an entirely different species from girls. I should know as I used to be one of the former. For example, boys have a propensity for shenanigans that would elicit an "Eeeuw!" from the gentler sex, as the following passage on Lincoln Logs, of which I myself had a set, illustrates:
"What Buddy Doberman and I discovered was that if you peed on Lincoln Logs you bleached them white. As a result we created, over a period of weeks, the world's first albino Lincoln Log cabin, which we took to school as part of a project on Abraham Lincoln's early years."
Or this regarding the elementary school's space heaters:
"The most infamous radiator-based activity was of course to pee on the radiator in one of the boys' bathrooms. This created an enormous sour stink that permeated whole wings of the school for days on end and could not be got rid of through any amount of scrubbing or airing."
I'm virtually certain that Susan, Laura, Barbara and Doris never did either.
Bill's recollections otherwise ran the gamut of those of any kid of either sex from that era: family vacations, the first televisions, favorite TV shows, the nature of contemporary comic books, toys, soda pop and candies, parents' occupations and eccentricities, Mom's cooking, the specter of The Bomb and Godless Communism, drop and cover drills, Saturday afternoons at the movie matinees, the National Pastime (major league baseball), the State Fair, Dick and Jane books, visits to Grandpa's farm, paper routes, strange relatives, and Best Friends. Oddly, there's no mention anywhere of a family pet. Is it that he never had one? How is this possible?
Then, of course, there's the budding fascination with sex that includes the discovery of Ol' Dad's secret stash of girlie mags and the unfulfilled, feverish desire to see play pal Mary O'Leary nekkid.
As in the author's other books, his ability to tell the story with a wry and self-deprecating wit is unmatched by any contemporary writer that I've read with the exception of Barbara Holland. Both are national treasures.
Bryson's young adventures took place in Des Moines, Iowa, a much different environment than the Southern California in which I had mine. But, there's a degree of similarity that transcends region so long as that region lies in the U.S. of A. One of Bill's nostalgias in particular that I wouldn't have recalled in a million years but is oh, so true was:
"Of all the tragic losses since the 1950s, mimeograph paper may be the greatest. With its rapturously fragrant, sweetly aromatic pale blue ink, mimeograph paper was literally intoxicating."
It's in the nature of the aging human to recall previous times as so much better. Nowadays, as we're inundated with rampant political correctness, discredited heroes, and the pathetic likes of Paris, Britney and Lindsay, I can look back and say about many things, as Bill does:
"... I saw the last of something really special. It's something I seem to say a lot these days."
 Des Moines' own local hero in defense of a boy's right to be dirty July 11, 2008
12 out of 16 found this review helpful
Approximately normal, but at times excessively disgusting, Bryson gives us the frog's perspective to Halberstam's magnificent bird's eye view of the Fifties.
Bryson's specific kind of humour, the exaggeration to absurdity of nearly everything, can be very funny, but also trying. Boys will be boys, so they do odd things, but when you exaggerate them, they go a bit out of their normal frame. Some of his stories are plain yukki. (eating buttered popcorn in a cinema while peeling something soft away from underneath the chair? crawling underneath the toilet partitions to lock all doors from the inside? watching the man with the hole in his throat while he eats and speaks? etc ad nauseam, literally)
So the fun is there but not always.
Apart from that, my main reason to read the book is the fact that Bryson grew up with a dad who was a sports reporter, and in Bryson's surely not exaggerated recollection the greatest American baseball reporter ever. Now that I have resigned from my less than promising career as a reviewer at Amazon.de to focus fully on Amazon.com, I realized that I have no clue why you guys like baseball so much.
After Bryson, I still don't have a clue, but I learned one thing: it must help to have grown up with it. I guess I will never make it even to the outer circles of the half-initiated.
Laugh out loud funny! January 24, 2008
7 out of 7 found this review helpful
Even though this is the era in which my parents grew up, and not me, I thoroughly enjoyed this memoir and would recommend it to people of all ages. While I'm sure the baby boomer generation would really find this book resonating with their life experiences, I think its an intersting look at a unique and fascinating time in our country's history and will appeal to a much wider audience, such as myself (I'm in my late 20's).
The author is hysterical and I found myself laughing out loud throughout the book. It was so interesting to learn about growing up in Des Moines in the 50s - everything from what people ate to how they shopped to the trouble kids and teens got into- it is indeed such a stark contrast to growing up in America today, regardless of where you live.
I think this book would make a particularly great book club selection and would also be interesting reading for history classes or classes on American culture, etc. I HIGHLY recommend it!
A Window into the Joy of Life in the 50's October 20, 2007
6 out of 6 found this review helpful
Bill Bryson has long distinguished himself as a gifted writer with a knack for entertaining us as he takes us on his travels around the globe. So he does, as well, in his memoir, "The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid," although this time, it is time travel back to the 1950's. It is very much a window into the time in which he--and I--grew up, a retrospective for Baby Boomers. He captures it perfectly, and were it not for the fact that his childhood was in Des Moines, it just as well could have been mine, in Chicago. I found myself chuckling with familiarity at his memories, which parallel my own in so many ways, from penny candy to reversible jackets, and from air raid drills to dentist drills--sans novocaine. His sense of amusement, cynicism and even awe at that which went on around him, along with his wry observations of the family he grew up in, has no doubt been seasoned by his age, maturity and reflection, but in many ways, it is also an unfiltered look at a simpler time, with the perspective of his years burnishing, rather than altering, what it was like to grow up in mid-twentieth century middle America. I recommend "Thunderbolt Kid" highly to all who relish the chance to sit down and savor what could just as well be their own family album, in words that could just as well be pictures. A thoroughly enjoyable and magical read.
Both informative and entertaining December 4, 2007
6 out of 6 found this review helpful
I have read two other books by Bryson and enjoyed them but wasn't sure I'd like this, probably because it was about being a child in the fifties (my childhood experiences were in the seventies) in Iowa America (I'm in Yorkshire, England) however I shouldn't have doubted his talent for relating life experiences to just about everyone.
I laughed out loud at his father's out of character taking the family to Disneyland as well as the motley crew of childhood relatives and friends he describes.
He could actually be describing any of our childhoods, from teenage crushes, the hierarchy of a gang of mates, Saturday morning cinema, comics and school. Which ever western country you grew up in you no doubt learnt to read from a book where 'Father' always wore a suit and 'Mother' a frilly apron and everyone said "look" at the beginning of each sentence!!
As well as being informative about 1950's America, it's a really entertaining read for those who like to look back happily on their childhood.
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