Books : The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid: A Memoir
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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 910.4092
EAN: 9780767919371
ISBN: 0767919378
Label: Broadway
Manufacturer: Broadway
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 288
Publication Date: September 25, 2007
Publisher: Broadway
Release Date: September 25, 2007
Sales Rank: 1583
Studio: Broadway
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Editorial Review:
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.
Average Rating: 
Rating:  -
I do enjoy Bryson's writing, and have thoroughly enjoyed his other work. And I do enjoy the writing in this book. However...why am I not laughing so hard at this book? My boyhood in the 60s was just under ten years removed from the world Bryson describes. Yet so much of what he describes was real about my world, too. I, like him, feel keenly the passing of a world and a way of life that was decent and enjoyable. Perhaps it is that bittersweet aspect of it all that makes this book less of a laugher for me. I have to say that the book brought back many fond memories for me, and evoked a time when we all rode bicycles without helmets, collected pop bottles for cash, avidly read comic books, etc. Granted, there are darker aspects of that era that we are better for leaving behind, but what have we lost from the middle part of the twentieth century, and what will we lose from the current era? So, I put this book down and sigh, and reflect on this and other questions, and I don't laugh as hard as I did with his other books.
Rating:  -
this book chokes me up. I seem to recall some rich times in my childhood, only I find it hard to think about my childhood because of the many violent episodes visited upon me by my hard-drinking parents. I guess I've spent the last 40 years forgetting the first ten. It literally hurts me to read of someone's normal and happy childhood. I finished the book today, came home and got drunk.. thanks mom and dad. In a way I wish I never read the book,..I have this irrational fantasy that everyone else got beat up all time by their drunk parents, and now it's going to take me awhile to get that back.
the book is finely written, though some of the gags were predictable and detracted from the reading. for example: burning the bald uncle's head with a magnifying glass,..c'mon. dropping peanut M&M's that shatter into a thousand shiny pieces,..I'm sure everyone else loves that stuff, but to me the "sight gags" mar the overall quality of the book. Still, 5 stars for an extraordinary reading experience.
Rating: -
I have to say that I love Bill Bryson's work. He never fails to make me laugh out loud. His work is funny, witty, smart, and he always seems to find the irony in life. I actually tend to get his audio books, because his stories seem best told orally. However, I did buy the paperback of his Thunderbolt Kid. This book did not fail me.
Rating:  -
Growing up in Des Moines, Iowa during this time period I could relate to most of the places mentioned and the book had me lauging harder than I have in years. It is the first book I've actually enjoyed enough to finish in years.
Rating: -
Bill Bryson's first book "The Lost Continent" starts with the line "I came from Des Moines, Iowa. Somebody had to." We now get the slightly exaggerated childhood and adolescence of Bill Bryson, aka The Thunderbolt Kid (in his own mind anyway) in Des Moines in the 1950s, when life in the USA for the average person was at its very best and unequalled anywhere else. Mr. Bryson presents an affectionate picture of the now-disappeared small(ish)-town America in the pre-McDonald's era, before Everywhere became like Everywhere Else.
I confess that I am a sucker for his droll style and keen sense of observation - he seems to have a talent for making the ordinary wryly amusing and even laugh-out-loud funny. I can understand why other people wouldn't find this book as thoroughly enjoyable as some of his other stuff. I'm not one of those.
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