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The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid: A Memoir |  | Author: Bill Bryson
Publisher: Broadway
Category: Book
List Price: $15.99
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Rating:  352 reviews
Sales Rank: 3104
Media: Paperback
Pages: 270
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.6
Dimensions (in): 8 x 5.2 x 0.9
ISBN: 0767919378
Dewey Decimal Number: 910.4092
EAN: 9780767919371
ASIN: 0767919378
Publication Date: September 25, 2007
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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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Showing reviews 1-5 of 352
 I was literally sent downstairs for laughing too loud. October 19, 2006
David McCune (Tacoma, WA)
147 out of 151 found this review helpful
Seriously. I was up past bedtime, and I was reading Bryson's description of lame 1950's toys. I won't give it away, but imagine what he can do with the topic of "electric football". After a particularly vigorous episode of chortling, my wife trudged out of bed to decree that, if I insisted on continuing to read, I'd have to take it downstairs.
And that's what this book is, a laugh-out-loud remembrance of a simpler, sillier time. Bryson's travelogues are what made him famous, and he never would have made it without a fantastic memory for detail and an ability to convey a vivid mental picture of the topics he chooses. His descriptions of 1950's Des Moines are consistently evocative. It's like a travelogue unearthed from a 50 year old time capsule. I feel like I have visited there.
Still, readers of Bryson known that what truly sets him apart is his uncanny ability to attract and describe morons, as well as all manner of idiotic situations (generally self-inflicted). For a man who can do this on, say, a simple trip to Australia, imagine how much comedy gold can be mined from a childhood in the Midwest of the 50's. It is, as they say, a target-rich environment. His remembrances include family, friends, school, Des Moines, lame childhood toys, nuclear bombs, and more. Even things like TV dinners, which we have all heard mocked before, are skewered in new and amusing ways.
For all of that, though, the memoir is not mean spirited. I think that the ridicule works so well because it is easy to sense Bryson's real affection for his subjects (well, at least the ones who aren't carbonized by the x-ray vision of the Thunderbolt Kid). He's poking fun, but in a way that family and friends might poke fun at each other over old childhood foibles at a Thanksgiving dinner. It's the humor that you get when your wife knows that you're ridiculous, but loves you just the same. This book belongs with such classic tributes to youth as The Wonder Years, Stand By Me, and A Christmas Story. Buy it, and enjoy it. Just try not to read it next to someone's bedroom.
The FUNNIEST book I have read in years!!! October 18, 2006
Lesley West (St James, Western Australia)
79 out of 82 found this review helpful
This is a wonderful, funny, and ultimately very human book, which reminds us all, no matter who we are or where we live (I'm Australian) of the total joys of a happy childhood.
Bill Bryson is the first to confess that his was a normal, uneventful and by the standards of today, relatively bland childhood. But thankfully this has been rendered into a book that will have you laughing aloud, as we hear of his evolution into the fearless Thunderbolt Kid, complete with super hero talents; the list of alien (now commonplace) foods that never graced the family table, and the unique and gruesome ways he managed to hurt himself whilst playing (I was particularly fond of the tale where he hit his head on a rock and his friends bought pieces of his "brain" to his house - kids can be so thoughtful).
This is a ray of sunshine in the literary world. It is truly the most delightful thing that I have read in a very long time, and I am a voracious devourer of books. I enjoy Bill's travel books, as he is a talented and observant writer, but this is a cut above - I think his very best to date.
Do yourselves a favour. Buy yourself a couple of hours of happiness and read this book. Buy it for your friends and relatives, and relive your happy and normal childhood all over again. You will all treasure that moment where you remembered how you were a super-hero/alien/king or queen, and then get back to your normal, uneventful, adult lives.
Made in America's Heartland January 3, 2008
Joseph Haschka (Glendale, CA USA)
30 out of 30 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."
Laugh out loud funny January 1, 2007
Corinne H. Smith (Athol, MA USA)
17 out of 19 found this review helpful
Any Baby Boomer who thinks fondly on a childhood in the 1950s will enjoy this book immensely. Born in 1951 and raised in Des Moines, Iowa, Bill Bryson had what we might consider the average middle-class life in the geographic center of America. As such, it's easy for us to nod in agreement at many of the details he recalls: spider-web-like strands of airplane glue that stuck to everything except small plastic model pieces; the confusion of having two different actors play the Lone Ranger on TV; the stilted and unrealistic conversations we read in our Dick and Jane textbooks; and the fact that we all spent our free time outside, making up our own games. Bryson additionally got into a few unusual scrapes with some of his neighborhood buddies, and the distance of time makes each one of their escapades a real hoot. Those post-war days were indeed the best of times and the worst of times. The nation grew wealthy and happier and stronger, and technological advances like television made us feel more powerful. Simultaneously the Cold War intensified, and we grew ever more fearful of a nuclear attack from Russia. It was a unique and great time to be a kid.
"Happily," Bryson writes, "we were indestructible. We didn't need seat belts, air bags, smoke detectors, bottled water, or the Heimlich maneuver. We didn't require child-safety caps on our medicines. We didn't need helmets when we rode our bikes or pads for our knees and elbows when we went skating. We knew without a written reminder that bleach was not a refreshing drink and that gasoline when exposed to a match had a tendency to combust. We didn't have to worry about what we ate because nearly all foods were good for us: sugar gave us energy, red meat made us strong, ice cream gave us healthy bones, coffee kept us alert and purring productively." (pages 69-70)
To his own experiences, Bryson adds historical tidbits that now seem unbelievable, except that we suddenly remember when they were true. Everyone smoked. TV dinners were invented and enjoyed, even though each of the food components had an aluminum taste. The civil rights movement hadn't yet taken full form. No one knew or cared about the dangers of DDT or witnessing a nuclear test from a ridge a hundred miles away. And yet, most of us survived the decade.
Reading this memoir will make you wistful for those days of atomic toilets, comic book Kiddie Corrals, unrated movies, and grape Nehi bubbles up your nose. It'll also have you laughing right out of your chaise longue and Capri pants.
Amazing that this wild child grew up to be Bill Bryson October 26, 2006
Jesse Kornbluth (New York)
19 out of 22 found this review helpful
Bill Bryson was born in 1951 in Des Moines, Iowa. Talk about lucky! "I can't imagine there has ever been a more gratifying time or place to be alive than America in the 1950s," he writes. "We became the richest country in the world without needing the rest of the world."
And Billy Bryson --- white, Protestant, son of a brilliant sportswriter and the home furnishings editor of the Des Moines Register --- was in just the right place to take full advantage.
As many of you know, Bryson grew up to live in England and write first class travel books --- A Walk in the Woods, his account of walking the Appalachian Trail with his out-of-shape friend, Steve Katz, is both informative and hilarious --- and serious studies of language, like Bryson's Dictionary of Troublesome Words. But as a kid, he was a pure doofus. He had no interest in school, his city's cultural institutions or its many opportunities for youth athletics.
By the testimony of this memoir, Billy Bryson had only one childhood obsession: trouble. Namely, how much damage to property and civility could one fresh-faced boy --- and, of course, his posse of equally privileged homies --- do each and every day.
And because kids roamed free in those days and time stretched to the horizon, Billy had all of Des Moines as his target.
Exhibit A: He liked to hide on the top floor of an office building with a central atrium. Seven stories below was a restaurant: "A peanut M&M that falls seventy feet into a bowl of tomato soup makes one heck of a splash, I can tell you."
Exhibit B: He delighted in using a magnifying glass to focus a beam of sunlight on the bald head of his napping Uncle Dick to see what would happen: "What happened was that you burned an amazingly swift, deep hole that would leave Dick and a team of specialists at Iowa Lutheran Hospital puzzled for weeks."
Exhibit C: He once peed on brown Lincoln Logs to turn them white --- and then watched, deadpan, as a teacher licked the toy logs to prove they'd been bleached with lemon juice.
Weird characters abound. Like Bill's mother, who wrote about the home, but was derelict in the domestic arts: "As a rule you knew it was time to eat when you could hear potatoes exploding in the oven." Like Bill's father, who was so cheap that when the Brysons finally drove out to Disneyland, Bill asked his mother, "Have I got leukemia?" Like another kid's dad, doing a swan dive from the high board, changing his mind in mid-air and landing flat: "At such a speed water effectively becomes a solid." And like Uncle Dee, who had a surgically-made hole in his neck: "Whatever he ate turned into a light spray from his throat hole."
Are you laughing yet? Methinks you should be. There is funny, and then there is Bill Bryson, who makes you howl with laughter and fight for breath. "The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid" is not a book for the seriously ill, the commuter who uses public transportation or even the easily grossed-out. But for everyone over 50 who grew up in a house and had parents who owned a car, health and circumstances matter not --- this is the story of at least part of your youth.
It was a time of flattop haircuts ("landing spots for some very small experimental aircraft"). Cigarettes. Cocktails. Cars with no seat belts, drinks thick with sugar, medicine with no child-proofing. Televisions everywhere. Electric football games. Misbehave, and you get sent to "the cloakroom." Paper routes.
Every once in a while, Bryson sprinkles the pages with seriousness that is all the more powerful for its scarcity. Did you know that Lewis Strauss, chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, started his career as a shoe salesman? Did you know that, at the peak of the Red Scare, "thirty-two of the forty-eight states had loyalty oaths"? Did you know about Lamar Smith, an African American, who successfully voted in Mississippi --- only to be shot dead on the courthouse steps?
Books that are nostalgic and funny and have seriousness just under the surface tend to have sad, "those were the days" endings. The first mall is built, and right there we know the central business district is doomed. Graduation is like a break shot in pool --- the old gang scatters and never reunites. And so on.
Bryson avoids the gooey emotions by saving his best crimes and his zaniest characters --- Steve Katz, co-star of "A Walk in the Woods" --- for last. Fake drivers' licenses. Beer robberies. And nobility, for in Des Moines, at least, there was, for one gang of kids, honor among thieves.
"I was," Bryson says, "enormously stupid." Yes. He was, and this book is the proof.
But he also says that his book is "about not very much, about being small and getting larger slowly." Wrong. "The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid" is about being wide-awake and seeing everything and getting every last weird detail down exactly right.
And that makes his memoir almost surely the most enjoyable book you'll read this year.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 352
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