The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid: A Memoir

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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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The author also seemed to have a fondness for the word SH*% also. The use of the 'F' bomb was spattered among the book.it seemed contrived and out of place for a book of this quality. Well.so much for fun reading. A great book, funny, well written.but then right when you are enjoying yourself the author seems think that it's just fine to throw in the 'F' bomb. Go figure. I would have loved to recommend this book to family and friends, but not so now. I was very disappointed, as I wanted to love this book.but alas.everyone seems to think the world goes around blurting profanity. Believe it or not.some of us find profanity, well, profane.

He's done it to me any number of times since I first read(actually heard)"Notes From A Small Island", although I'll refrain from spending too much time with Katz, or sleeping on a bench in Dover, with a pair of Y-fronts over my head. I could care less. Take my car(borrow my copy)." Rock & Saunders, being overjoyed to mow them down with a Tommy Gun, a Fanner 50, or a Johnny-7 OMA, the one man army gun), I can easily see how tough it must be to be certain that you are living with people who are not your real family.

However, have you ever noticed he really seems to get off on being able to look down on the tops of peoples' heads. To paraphrase Bryson's comment about Salisbury's Wiltshire Museum: "I urge you to go there(read this)immediately. I feel an affinity with Bill Bryson. Both of us entered the world in late 1951, neither of us can understand the British TV industry's fascination with "Cagney & Lacey", we were both thrilled by "This Is Cinerama", we really don't get why old ladies will squirrel away a few canned peas, and we both met our wives while working the night shift in a Victorian asylum in the outskirts of London, which later burned. Anyway, "The Life and Times Of The Thunderbolt Kid" is Bryson at his best: qualifyingly affectionate, irreverent, and evocative of a kinder, gentler middle-class American upbringing. I've no doubt Bill Bryson was told many times(as I was), "You'll put your eye out, kid." While I never imagined myself any kind of a superhero type like The Thunderbolt Kid, able to vaporise foes in the wink of an eye(I identified more with Sgts.

By the way, Katz, his(and now our) friend, who we met in "A Walk In The Woods" and "Neither Here Nor There" appears in "Thunderbolt Kid", and we get some insight into how he became who(or what)he is.sort of like Lex Luthor, or Eric Cartman. Kind of like poor Kal-El, when he falls to Earth, and he's going to be stuck with people like the Kents in Smallville until he can split for the bright lights of Gotham City(or in Bryson's case, Virginia Water, rural Yorkshire, Durham, or Hanover, NH. Of course, I also can't understand the reviewers who label this book as "left-wing propaganda". If I could move back and forth, I sure as heck would, and FYI, he is working to PRESERVE Britain and its heritage, he's not working to bring down the USA.Like all good writers, Bryson has the gift of transporting his reader to a place, and a time that may be far away, and making the reader want to be, or go, there(or sometimes making the reader absolutely ecstatic that they ain't). Reading this transports me to little towns called Midvale, or Springville, or Edmonds, or Smallville. I also don't get the people who take Bryson to task for moving back to the UK. OK, so maybe I met my wife by picking her up on the street in Seattle, but still, the similarities are uncanny, eh.

But I still don't understand how Clark left Lana Lang behind: she was ten times hotter than Lois Lane). It also strongly brings back the late Jean Shepard's wonderful writings about the semi-mythical Homan, Indiana, overpopularized by the great movie "Christmas Story". Whether on the upper deck on an English bus, or the upper floor of his hometown department store, he really seems to dig that a lot. It's "Leave It To Beaver", but in color, and without Larry Mondello, or Dad changing his make of car when the sponsor changed.

No matter what part of the country you grew up in you will probably relate to growing up with parents who grew up during the Great Depression. This is a too funny look at growing up in the baby-boom generation.

Oops.But I have to say that there were also several sections that didn't work for me. This is an easy read and perfect for those times when you don't feel up to any brain-strain. On the whole I liked this book. The excessive hyperbole became boring and the f word was jarring (it seemed to be thrown in out of the blue in places where it wasn't necessary).But it was fun to read about Bryson's childhood in Des Moines -- I grew up on a farm about twenty miles away at about the same time so I enjoyed comparing our experiences. :) My favorite part was when Billy's mother convinces him that his sister's capri pants are pirate pants and he wears them to school. At this point my husband pointedly pulled the pillow over his head and turned on his side away from me.

The book chronicles author Bill Bryson's adventures growing up as a boy in Des Moines Iowa in the 1950s. The toity jar, the cottage cheese and uncle with the hole in his throat, the elusive stripper's tent, burnt family dinners, kids running happily through insecticide smog, the beer stealing operation, lying in the yard with a broken leg that went unnoticed for hours, and so so much more.

This book was just HAPPY, HILARIOUS, and FUN -an increasingly rare combination to come by in a book anymore. I loved it all.

What a fun book. I was angrily admonished on a couple of nights by my husband to stop cracking up because he was trying to sleep.

I loved it. I had been meaning to read this for a couple of years, and am so glad I finally did.

There were so many parts in this book that I laughed so hard I thought I would cry.