Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1230 in Books
• Published on: 2007-06-04
• Binding: Paperback
• 416 pages

New York Times
'Outlandishly and improbably entertaining...inevitably [I] would
be reduced to body-racking, tear-inducing, de-couching laughter.'

Literary Review
'Always witty and sometimes hilarious…wonderfully funny and
touching.'

Daily Mail
'A funny, effortlessly readable, quietly enchanted memoir...Bryson
also provides a quirky social history of America.'

Customer Reviews

Warm, funny and informative
In case you think this is an autobiography of Bill Bryson's childhood, I would say it isn't really and given what he has produced thats a good thing. What we have here is a warm, funny and immensely engaging commentary on life in small town America during BB's childhood period.
Never having visited any of the places in the book I felt I knew them quite intimately by the end of the book. The death of small community economies of primarily family businesses at the hands of corporate development is central to the story of the US BB grew up in.
BB has written a number of excellent books and I think this is probably the best and most readable.

Laugh out loud and amaze yourself that this was only 50 years ago
Full of facts and information about life in the US during the 1950s and beyond presented in a very humerous way, allowing the reader to visualise the world surrounding Bill Bryson as he was growing up, while appreciating the absurdity of the culture and beliefs at the time.
This was a book which made me laugh out loud many times and chuckle to myself a lot. It is the sort of book that you have to read out bits of to those around you when you are reading it (usually to their annoyance!)
I have already read a few Bill Bryson books and will continue to look them out.

A Delight
I always look forward with great anticipation to reading a new Bill Bryson and this one certainly doesn't disappoint. Bryson has a wonderfully "ordinary" and chatty writing style that just draws you into his books. It is only after some time that you realise that amongst the humour is often a serious message. Bryson writes as if he is your best mate chatting amiably over a pint at the local.

The Thunderbolt Kid not only draws you into the American boom of the 1950s but takes you on an historic drive through those years. Having been brought up in England in the 50s I can see so many parallels.

Bryson started his first book with the line "I come from Des Moines. Somebody had to" as if he is apologetic. In this book he makes Des Moines sound the most wonderful place on earth, continually referring to the good humour and kindness of the people. It made me want to go there, although there is an edge to his writing towards the end when he charts the birth of shopping malls, the growth of racial unrest as the world "grew up" - and not for the better. "All this disturbed tranquility occurred in the space of just over a year. People have never gone from happy to not happy more quickly," he writes.

At times he hits a few bleak notes about the reality of growing up and the place in which he lived: "At just the point where I was finally growing up, Des Moines stopped feeling like the place I had grown up in."

It is so refreshing to find a book about a normal childhood - the kind of childhood experienced by the majority of American and British kids. Bryson is quick to point out that his kid days were good ones. His parents were patient, kind and normal. He wasn't chained in the cellar or called It. And there lies the vitality of the story.

I must admit to having read the three child abuse books by Dave Pelzer with interest. They are quite rightly shocking but they spawned a whole host of child abuse books, increasingly bizarre and shocking. Bryson suffered none of this. He was a regular American boy growing up in a regular American family. But that is exactly what makes this book so "peachy." You just know nothing bad is going to happen and so it becomes an antidote to all the abuse books.

Bryson embraces the politics of the time, the fears, but above all the modernisation of the world that was the fifties and which led to the explosion of freedom that became the sixties. There are wonderful lines and passages throughout the book. Stories of the toity jar for those young people taken short and who cannot reach the bathroom in time are wonderful evocations of less frenetic times. Similarly we see the 50s as a time of naivity with the start of commercialism, but a commercialism built on the gullibility of the people who really did believe that smoking was good for them and that Camel cigarettes were the choice of doctors.

He travels into the land of the adult historian where he gives us snapshots of the leaders of the day, but always returns to the mundanity of childhood. Thus we have an instructive passage on the fight for democracy in Guatemala and the work of the democratic Jacobo Arbenz and how he was overthrown by a capitalistic backed coup only to be brought back to the world of the young with the words "let us return to Kid World where the denizens may be small and often immensely stupid, but are at least comparatively civilized.

Ultimately he remembers the 50s with tremendous affection "The best I can say is that I saw the last of something really special. It's something I seem to say a lot these days."

Bryson is an entertainer, he is a storyteller, an historian and the Thunderbolt Kid is a wonderful evocation of 1950s Americana. Roll on the next book by an author who rather surprisingly has settled down to live about three miles away from where I'm writing this.