Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1127 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

Not one of his best - for UK readers
In this book, Bryson reminisces about life growing up in Iowa in the 1950s. For anyone else who was a kid in the US in the 1950s, I am sure this book will bring back nostalgic memories. But for those of us who grew up in the UK, the lists of the food he ate, drinks he drank, baseball games he saw and TV shows he watched have very little meaning. The book is written in Bryson's familiar humorous avuncular style, and is quite amusing in places (though much of the humour is rather lavatorial). But it is not in the same league as, for example, Notes From a Small Island. There are the usual exaggerated anecdotes, where the reader is left pondering how much truth there is in them, and the usual nostalgia for times past. I am surprised it has got such good reviews here. Perhaps if I wasn't such a Bryson fan, I wouldn't be so disappointed.

Simply brilliant.
Ah....you know that lovely satisfied feeling you get when you're drinking a cup of tea and eating a couple of chocolate digestives? You'll get the same kind of pleasure you get from reading this book.

It's a memoir of Bill Bryson's childhood; a wonderful tale of America in the 50's through the eyes of a young boy who would one day entertain us all with his wonderful writing skills. I think this is probably one of his best books - as well as detailing fascinating snippets of 1950's small town America, it's also a poignant recollection of a world which has gone forever. It's a story that makes you laugh out loud one minute (this happened a lot) and then smile nostalgically the next as you remember the good old days and times when the world seemed so much bigger, (probably because we were all so much more smaller?).

Wonderful, warm and witty. Tea and chocolate on paper basically.

Funny - But Unfocused and Dashed Off
At this point, I've read most (but not quite all) of Bryson's narrative works, and this is probably his weakest. In interviews, he's admitted that writing his previous book, (A Short History of Nearly Everything) was rather taxing, and he was looking for something relatively easy to tackle after that. The result is that this meandering childhood memoir/ode to the halcyon days of 1950s America feels rather loose and dashed off in comparison to his other books. There's still good writing, good humor (albeit a bit more forced than usual), and good anecdotes, but instead of a solid framework or narrative arc, he relies on a lot of cut-and-paste cultural history to serve as the binding glue.

Bryson grew up in a comfortably prosperous family in Des Moines, Iowa, and clearly enjoys this extended trip down memory lane. Whether or not the reader has as much fun probably depends on their approach to the book. For one thing, you have to realize that Bryson depends a great deal on exaggeration and comedic license to amp up the humor in his recollections -- to the point where it's not clear what really happened and what is just a good yarn. Also, since this is Bryson as a kid, a lot of the humor derives from rather juvenile sources.

Another thing to realize is that Bryson's 1950's middle-American childhood is pretty unremarkable and uneventful (something he readily admits in the foreword). We are treated to well-worn touchstones such as the arrival of the first TV on the block, the promise and threat of the atomic age, the banning of comic books, the lure of the movie theater, the rise of teenagers, etc. The problem is that many, if not most, American readers will have heard most of this stuff before. Another problem is that the chronology is somewhat confused. For example, he goes into detail on how his beloved comic books were sanitized by industry's adoption of the self-censoring Comic Book Code, but that actually happened in 1954, when Bryson was 2 years old! Indeed, most of the hijinks he relates take place in the 1960s, but one would be hard pressed to realize this with all the 1950s background material.

Don't get me wrong, there are a number of memorable anecdotes that will bring chuckles and outright laughs to the reader. My own favorites included the match wars he and his friends would wage in a dark basement, and a rather spectacular beer heist. But the whole enterprise feels rather phoned-in and more like a flaccid first draft than a finished book. Nostalgia seekers and Bryson fans will probably find it worth checking out (especially for the appearances of his traveling pal Stephen Katz), but others will find it somewhat pointless.