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The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid: A Memoir
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The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid: A Memoir
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The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid: A Memoir
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The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid: A Memoir

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

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BONUS FEATURE: Exclusive interview with the author.

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 middle of the United States in the middle of the last century. A book that delivers on the promise that it is "laugh-out-loud funny."

Some say that the first hints that Bill Bryson was not of Planet Earth came from his discovery, at the age of six, of a woollen jersey of rare fineness. Across the moth-holed chest was a golden thunderbolt. It may have looked like an old college football sweater, but young Bryson knew better. It was obviously the Sacred Jersey of Zap, and proved that he had been placed with this innocuous family in the middle of America to fly, become invisible, shoot guns out of people's hands from a distance, and wear his underpants over his jeans in the manner of Superman.

Bill Bryson's first travel book opened with the immortal line, "I come from Des Moines. Somebody had to." In this hilarious new memoir, he travels back to explore the kid he once was and the weird and wonderful world of 1950s America. He modestly claims that this is a book about not very much: about being small and getting much larger slowly. But for the rest of us, it is a laugh-out-loud book that will speak volumes - especially to anyone who has ever been young.
LanguageEnglish
Release dateOct 17, 2006
ISBN9780739315248
Unavailable
The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid: A Memoir

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Rating: 3.9058854430540824 out of 5 stars
4/5

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  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Hilarious and well-written, in typical Bryson style. My only issue was that he focused more on the 50s, mentioned the 60s a bit, but then glossed over his high school years in just a few pages. Though it IS called "the Thunderbolt KID," I would have liked to read more about his entire youth. However, that is me being nitpicky because I really enjoyed the entire book, especially the last chapter where he shares what has come of his childhood friends and landmarks.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    My love affair with Bill Bryson began about a year ago when I discovered A Walk in the Woods. It made me laugh out loud more than any book I had read previously, and my husband resorted to asking me to please not read it in bed, at least after he fell asleep, because the constant giggling was just too much. Since then, I’ve recommended the book to almost everyone I know (and everyone who’s read it has liked it), and Mr. Bryson has earned a spot among my favorites.The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid is Bryson’s memoir of his childhood in 1950s Iowa, when children knew how to amuse themselves without television and adolescent boys spent the better part of their years plotting ways to glimpse even one picture of a naked woman. Bryson devotes several pages to describing these pursuits, and they are both hilariously entertaining and touchingly nostalgic. Like contemporary memoirs by David Sedaris and Augusten Burroughs, among others, this memoir presents vignettes from Bryson’s young life rather than following the traditional linear narrative form of autobiography, and the snapshots come together to give us a wonderfully robust image of who he was and what life was like back then.Of the countless laugh-out-loud moments in this book, my favorites included Bryson’s story of the day his mother sent him to school wearing his older sister’s very tight, very green capri pants; the time he and a friend peed on Lincoln Logs to bleach them white but allowed their teacher, who thought they’d used lemon juice, to lick them, declaring “I can taste the tartness;” and an episode in which a nosy teacher asked him, upon his request to use the restroom, whether he needed to go “number 1 or number 2,” to which Bryson, unfamiliar with these terms, responded, “Well, I don’t know…I need to do a big BM. It could be as much as a three or a four.” And all of that happens before his father walks downstairs, naked from the waist down, to get a midnight snack while his sister is entertaining friends. With stories like this and an entire chapter entitled “Sex and Other Distractions,” it’s impossible not to like this book.Another remarkable feature is the depth and detail of Bryson’s research. He is quite a dilettante, in the best sense of the word, and his vignettes are consistently couched in facts that place them in the larger political and social context of the time. The stories become history lessons, as I suppose is inevitable when they are written by the author of A Short History of Nearly Everything.My one complaint is that some material and information from a few of Bryson’s other books, namely Made in America and I’m A Stranger Here Myself,reappear in this one and give the reader a bit of literary deja vu. This is certainly understandable given the amount of research he has done over the years and the considerable overlap in subject matter, but I did find myself losing interest and skimming the familiar sections. If you’ve never read Bryson, though, this won’t be a problem for you, and this book would certainly be a great introduction to one of our best contemporary travel and memoir writers.The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid earns a solid 4 out of 5 stars for its humor, wit, and accessability to readers of all ages. It kind of makes me wish Mr. Bryson could follow me around and turn my everyday experiences into clever, memorable moments. This book would make a perfect gift for anyone who grew up in the 50s in middle America and who longs for the good old days but is equally as good for those of us who just wish we’d been around to see America when life was simpler.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    his is a memoir of Bill Bryson's childhood, growing up in the 1950s in rural Iowa. I really enjoyed this. The 1950s were more my parents' era than mine, but it was fun to read about all the events that happened and just general day-to-day stuff. There was a brief section in the middle that I didn't seem to find as funny, but a lot of it was. I think this is probably my favourite by Bryson that I've read so far. I listened to the audio, which also included a really interesting, short interview with Bryson about the book.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I really enjoyed this book. Gave me a really good feel for what it was like to grow up in the 1950's. There are some moments in this book that made me cry I was laughing so hard. His description of trying to use the restroom in a snow suit was worth the price of the book.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Thank you Billy, it was laugh-out-loud funny and I enjoyed it.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    This is an entertaining and competently written book, but it never quite fascinated or delighted me the way Bryson's best work does. Two possible reasons for that:

    1. The Dick and Jane era of America's history is already copiously documented in popular culture. A good two thirds of the anecdotes here seem like deleted minor scenes from A Christmas Story. That's not bad, but it's not amazing either.

    2. Bryson's combination of linguistic genius and self deprecation works best when he's discovering new things himself, as in Short History of Nearly Everything, Shakespeare, Walk in The Woods, Sunburned Country. Here, Bryson does his best to make the things he knows all too well also interesting to us. It doesn't always quite work.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Audio book review. Obviously this type of book benefits greatly by having the author read it and this was very enjoyable. Wow the 50's were dangerous, its a wonder anyone survived. A great romp through Bill Bryson's early life, growing up in the 50's. If you like his other books you will like this one. It has some wonderful over and understatements throughout. He captures a kid's perspective with great skill.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    A great trip down memory lane. I did not grow up in Des Moines, but came to Des Moines often enough to recognize a lot of places mentioned. It was laugh out loud funny.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I love this author's books and always end up crying with laughter. This book was no exception - he can't write fast enough for me.Back Cover Blurb:Bryson was born on December 8, 1951 and grew up in Des Moines, Iowa. He recounts many things that were invented during his childhood that fascinated him - frozen dinners, atomic toilets and television. He also remembers his adventures as 'The Thunderbolt Kid', an alter ego he made up for himself when he felt powerless. He was able to vaporize people with his heat vision and thought that he came from another planet. He tells us about his days at junior and high schools, about his smoking, drinking and stealing, although he didn't get caught at any of it. It is during this time that he meets his friend Stephen Katz who would accompany Bryson on many of his travel experiences. The last lines of the book are, 'What a wonderful world it was. We won't see its like again, I'm afraid.'
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I'd read anything by Bill Bryson, he makes me laugh without fail. Even if he wrote out his shopping list I'm sure he'd make it funny, unfortunately this is more or less what he falls back on a bit too often.
    The unique circumstances of a fifties american childhood are captured with an alien anthropologist's eye but the lists of products or TV shows I could have done without.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    I knew I would enjoy this memoir before I even picked it up to read as Bryson is one of my favourite non-fiction authors and this is him at his finest. This memoir is at growing up in the 1950s in middle America and Bryson writes about his own experience as well as the experience of the nation as a whole, as is his style.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    In "The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid," Bill Bryson reminds those of us of a certain age what a privilege it was to grow up in the 1950s. Sure there was polio, the McCarthy hearings and the threat of nuclear annihilation, but those were things our parents worried about, not us kids. For children, it was a golden time. We were allowed, no encouraged, to wander around our neighborhoods most of the day -- my friend and I called it "exploring" -- and our parents never seemed to worry about us or even place limits on how far we could go or, as long as we didn't miss a meal, when we had to be back.Bryson, a few years younger than me, spent his childhood in Des Moines, the son of one of the best baseball writers in America, never mind that Des Moines has never had a major league baseball team. Even so his father went to spring training every year and to the World Series every fall and won many writing awards. Bryson's mother, too, worked for the Des Moines Register, so if writing skill is something that can be inherited, which I doubt, we know where he got it from.His memoir devotes attention to the toys of that era (who can forget electric football, Lincoln Logs and, my favorite, chemistry sets?), school, family vacations (like my own family, Bryson's didn't travel much, but even so we both made it to Disneyland somehow), early television, grandparents, the discovery of sex and other topics related to growing up.Although he has never been known as a writer of fiction, Bryson strays close in this memoir, as when he tells of his adventures as his own superhero, the Thunderbolt Kid, or when he tells about a roller coaster "about four miles long, I believe, and some twelve thousand feet high." Exaggeration works in creating an amusing, sometimes outrageously funny, book."One of the great myths of life is that childhood passes quickly," Bryson writes. Indeed, time passes at glacier speed for children, if not for their parents, who like to tell each other how "they grow up so fast." I continue to marvel at how much I managed to pack into each day back in the 1950s, and it seems even more marvelous now at an age when if I can accomplish one thing in the morning and another thing in the afternoon, I think I have had a productive day. It was as if I, too, were the Thunderbolt Kid.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Bryson's idyllic memoir of a childhood in Des Moines, Iowa in the 1950s.
  • Rating: 1 out of 5 stars
    1/5
    Predictable , self-indulgent, over-written twaddle. Ever so slightly amusing in places.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    This was definitely a case of judging a book by its cover. Although I've devoured a number of Bryson's other books, the title and topic of this one just didn't appeal to me. But when a thumbed copy turned up in my household, I decided to have a read of the first couple of pages, and found myself only putting it down again half-way through.

    Part-memoir, part-history of a mid-western US state in the 1950s, The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid is a humourous look at Bryson's early life growing up in Des Moines, Iowa. There are dozens of amusing anecdotes about the vagaries of his family, his school and home life, his holidays, and his unending quest to catch a bit of 'female epidermis' in the flesh. The memories of his own life are interspersed with more general comments on the changes going on in America, with talk of economic growth, changing social mores, anti-Communist witchhunts, racism and the space race. Certainly, some of the things Bryson mentions happens before he was born, or the changes run on long in the 1960s, but it's still interesting to see a take on life in this baby boomer generation. Whilst there's a lot here that's surely unique to the America of the 50s, there's enough that is so simplistically human that I think most people will find passages reminiscent of their own trials and tribulations of youth. Ironically, despite being born a few decades later, I felt that a lot of the developments Bryson talks about in 1950s American society were the same ones I experienced as a child in rural England!

    All of this is delivered in Bryson's typical affable and humourous style, which if you're a fan, you're sure to lap up. Some readers have quite justifiably complained that Bryson's reliance on hyperbole and silliness to sweeten his anecdotes is a bit tiring, and makes it at times difficult to separate truth from fiction, but that's simply his style. I've always been inclined to link Bryson with Wodehouse in the way he wrote slapstick humour, and felt vindicated to read that he had readily gobbled up Wodehouse as a child. For me, this is classic Bryson. Some have pointed out that Bryson's labelling as a travel writer is going to have change with the latest additions to his oeuvre. But for me, he never was a travel writer, but a writer who travelled. After all, anyone attempting to travel across a continent armed only with the appropriate Bryson volume was merely arming themselves for a few giggly embarrassing moments on public transportation, nothing more. There are certainly enough laugh-out-loud moments here, and plenty of smiles in between, that you wonder sometimes it doesn't come with a warning sticker on the front.

    That said, one criticism that I must agree with is the book's design. There are quite a few pictures in the book, including some family photos, which are sadly captionless and only breezily explained in the footnotes at the back. The typeset is rather widely spaced, which whilst making it easier on the eyes, is just an excuse at padding. There's also a preview chapter from Neither Here nor There: Travels in Europe taking up space at the back, which makes this book, despite its heightened page count, one of Bryson's shorter volumes.

    Ultimately, this is a book for established Bryson fans. It isn't as well written as the best of his travelogues, and in terms of being informative, there isn't much here that isn't already widely known, but for a bit of light, nostalgic reading that is sure to put a smile on your face, it easily fits the bill.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Like most of the world, I am a Bill Bryson fan. His writing has constantly entertained me, whether the topic be his travels, the strangeness that is the United States, Shakespeare or 1927. "The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid" is not his best work but it is still an enjoyable read by anyone's standards.Bryson's memoir of his childhood in Iowa, interspersed with stories of the wider world, is entertaining in the main, although some of the minutiae of his life is not as interesting as he thinks it is. Still, it was good to meet some of the people he refers to in his other books, including his family (Bryson draws his father as completely eccentric, which may be exaggerated but a laugh to read) and the great Stephen Katz, as opposed to Cat Stevens.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    very entertaining, funny and brings up memomries from your own childhood.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    A great book about growing up in Midwest America. While I am quite a bit younger than the author, I enjoyed hearing about the 50s and Bill’s childhood. I found myself remembering parts of my own childhood I had long forgotten, which was quite enjoyable and surprising.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I've been a fan for a long time, and I was born in the 50s and into superheroes, so I was really looking forward to this. I found the tone to be all over the place, from wildly exaggerated humor (which he's very good at) to gentle nostalgia, to righteous anger at things like McCarthyism and racism, so that it seemed like chapters from several different books tossed together. The superhero subtext was set up well, then largely ignored except for a bit here and there. Strangely enough I found the last short chapter to be the best, where he talks about the real-life versions of some of the characters in the book.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Nostalgic look at Des Moines in the '50s. Mostly pretty funny but has adultish moments and situations. He uses the F-bomb a few times.

    I like his writing style though and will read more by him.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Bill Bryson has a gift of storytelling punctuated with a wonderful turn of phrase, and this no doubt inherited from his parents who were both writers at the Des Moines Register and Tribune. So it's in his blood, and good for him. What he picked up somewhere is a distinct liberal bent in which his "Blame America First" gene became expressive, and too bad for that. In the story Bryson relates his boyhood experiences in his unique literary voices which elicited numerous giggles and a few belly laughs. However, as the "The Thunderbolt Kid" grows, he begins to leave his pre-pubescent mind and body and turns into a grumpy old man commenting on not so much the way things were when he lived them but rather the way things now agree with his contemporary liberal bent. "Presentism" I believe they call it now, his "Blame America First" gene expressing itself, if you will.It would have been a fine book if he had just stayed in character but he didn't, and if I were to recommend this book (unlikely) I would suggest that the last three chapters be skipped in that you've already heard a steady drumbeat of this drivel on the nightly news. Still, many nice images from which to remember the 1950s in a way that was actually proud of America. Bryson made a point of reminding us of NASA's numerous rocket failures as seen of TV without mentioning that after the fall of the Soviet Empire, videos detailing the numerous and catastrophic failures of the Soviet space program that no one ever saw because the were - well - Soviets. Three and a half stars: five stars for the nostalgia minus 1 and a half for social/political drivel. Take it for what it's worth. It's a shame
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Finished this book, my feelings are the same- enjoyed his writing- with some exceptions- Will start reading one of his others soon.


    I like this guy. I've heard his other books are better but I'm liking his writing style. I'm a bit tired of the 4 letter words - I don't ever like that in books- But he's witty and entertaining. So far I'm enjoying his descriptions of life during the 1950's. So much that I almost wish I could have been born back then :)
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    A snapshot of middle America from the 1950s. Fictional in the details but largely accurate overall. An entertaining read.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    Listened to the Playaway, as read by the author. When will I learn that I am not amused by Bryson? I found the humor to be either stale or forced, or both. Also, he tried to give us a history lesson of the fifties and early sixties, but there was a lot he overlooked. And even when he did speak of the atrocities re' atom bombs and Emmet Till, he made them seem almost as trivial as the (exaggerated) fact that his mom (a full-time journalist) burnt supper every night. So, mildly diverting to keep me company while doing housework, but nothing to recommend.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    As usual with Bryson be prepared for a laugh out loud funny book. Only he could capture with irreverent beauty growing up in the Midwest. This book provides a great walk down memory lane for those who grew up in the 50's and early 60's.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    adult biography/memoir ; humor. This was my first Bill Bryson and I'm glad that I finally read one. There are lots of laugh out loud moments, and as a narrator (relating his childhood in the 50s) he reminds me quite a lot of the kid the "A Christmas Story" movie. Definitely recommend.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Delightful memoir of growing up in the 1950-60s. Reminiscent of [A Girl Named Zippy], but told by a boy in the relatively "large" city of Des Moines IA.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    An autobiography by Bill Bryson, rather tongue-in-cheek since he admits to having had a pretty ordinary childhood, on the whole. But Bryson has a talent for making the ordinary sound interesting - albeit with a bit of exaggeration here and there - and this was a very enjoyable book.

    It showed me whole swathes of American history in the 1950s which I knew nothing about, and paints an excellent picture of life for a fairly ordinary middle-class lad growing up in the USA.

    Recommended.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Great, funny, wise and witty book, especially for a kid from Iowa. Yonkers book dept., Bishop's Cafeteria, and all those interesting casseroles...Can't wait to read more Bryson.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Being a baby boomer, I could identify with the warmth and hilarity of Bryson's hometown experiences.Some real memories here.Reread for my book group. I enjoyed my second read-review as much as the first