The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid: A Memoir

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. OK, so maybe I met my wife by picking her up on the street in Seattle, but still, the similarities are uncanny, eh? However, have you ever noticed he really seems to get off on being able to look down on the tops of peoples' heads? 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! I could care less.
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. Reading this transports me to little towns called Midvale, or Springville, or Edmonds, or Smallville. It's "Leave It To Beaver", but in color, and without Larry Mondello, or Dad changing his make of car when the sponsor changed. 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". 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. 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. 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. But I still don't understand how Clark left Lana Lang behind: she was ten times hotter than Lois Lane!).
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!). 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. 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.
To paraphrase Bryson's comment about Salisbury's Wiltshire Museum: "I urge you to go there(read this)immediately. Take my car(borrow my copy)."

Every so often, a book comes along that is so good, you don't want to reach the end. "Thunderbolt Kid" is just such a book. I found myself having to pause regularly to allow my sides to stop aching from laughter, and I read about half of the book out loud to my wife because I HAD to share it. You don't read this book; it just happens inside your head. The trees that died to print this classic must be quite proud of their demise.

I found this book in a bookstore and was hooked from the first page! Bill Bryson writes a wonderfully humorous story that any child born in the 1950's can relate to. For Baby Boomers, the 1950's were an age of innocence, magic, discovery and wonder. Each chapter follows young Billy as he experiences and imagines his childhood world of Des Moines, Iowa. Bill captures the essence of each character in the book with wonderful detail, from parents to friends to teachers -- we all know people just like them all. Each chapter is a treasure and a great read for all.

Note to readers: Read only one chapter a day. You don't want to rush through this gem!

This is a very funny book and is a great view of growing up in the 50s and 60s. I loved it.

My primary motivation for buying this book is that I, like the author, grew up in Des Moines in the fifties (and left it for college and a career in the sixties), and I hoped that the book would be a pleasant trip down memory lane. In that regard, the author is largely successful in evoking a time and a place that I knew and loved. Indeed, I was surprised by his recall of Des Moines in the fifties, because when the curtain closed on that decade, Mr. Bryson, by my calculation, was in the third grade (I was in the eleventh).

The book is well written, humorous (the result of more than a little comedic license, I suspect), and triggered some wonderful memories of Des Moines. (The author does not limit himself to Des Moines: he tries, with mixed success, to examine America in the fifties, as well.) But while many of his descriptions of places that I knew from my youth resonated, I could not identify with the author, who grew up in one of the more affluent neighborhoods of the city's Westside, the most affluent side of town, light years from the working class neighborhood I called home. As I read his story, increasingly I heard the voice of a privileged kid; a privileged kid whose arrogance got the better of him when, in describing Riverview amusement park, he had this to say: "Kids from the Riverview district went to a high school so forlorn and characterless that it didn't have a proper name, just a geographical designation: North High. They detested kids from Theodore Roosevelt High School, the outpost of privilege, comfort, and quality footwear for which we were destined." I graduated from East High School, the other Des Moines high school possessed of a mere geographical designation, and I admit to having detested kids from Roosevelt. After reading the above, I was surprised to learn, decades later, that I still do. Despite these feelings, I think that Mr. Bryson and I can agree on this: Des Moines was a great place, and the fifties a wonderful time, in which to grow up.