The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid: A Memoir
admin | Mar 11, 2010 | 5 comments
- ISBN13: 9780767919371
- Condition: NEW
- Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
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.
$6.84
The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid: A Memoir
Filed Under: Read This Magazine
This was not an average middle class family.
I was expecting maybe a farm family which was more typical of Iowa in 1960
Rating: 1 / 5
Bryson is perhaps our most over-hyped author. He Is certainly my personal king-of-dashed-expectations. To say this is worse than the terrible “Walk in the Woods” (I know it is beloved by many) is about the most negative I can say, but it is. Why do people read this nonsense?
Rating: 1 / 5
But Bill,
Why, when you have an obvious love for our USA…did you become an ex-patriot????? It is very disturbing. Just not right. Your words flow as velvet. But…always, in the back of my mind, I’m a tad annoyed with your final decision to be a Brit. That is why I’m not giving 5 star
Rating: 4 / 5
I grew up in Ft. Wayne, Indiana in the ’50s and we hated it at the time. I thought I was being held captive in Hell and tortured on a regular basis. Bryson made Ft. Wayne sound good, in retrospect. We had all the same characters and did lots of the same stuff. But he left out one important category of growing up…..barfing in class. Man, that was always an event when someone barfed! It would stop the class while poor old Mr. Trimm would come in and mop it up. I’d say, in any given year, about 1/3 of the kids would barf at some time or other. And if you ever did it once, your buddies would never let you forget it. I don’t know how Byrson missed such an important topic….or maybe the food was just better in Des Moines.
Rating: 1 / 5
This was truly the worst. The attempt at humor falls flat. There were some things that ring true like electric football etc. The story is pure fiction with the author as the hero. The anti-american anti republican rant gets tiresome after awhile.The author misses no opportunity to denigrate the US.
From the cold war (Russia had a right to put warheads in Cuba because we had them in Europe)to George Bush being a draft dodger.What can you expect from a far left loon who hates this country so much that he moves to England. I got this book as a christmas present but never would have bought it and do not recommend it.;
Rating: 1 / 5