My son has been raving about Bill Bryson's for some time now, but I was not sure that they would appeal to me. After hearing others rave about his memoir: The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid, I thought this might be a fun audio book. I am sorry I waited so long to try Bryson's work.

This memoir was terrific. It leaves you with a feeling of appreciation for the simple things in life. Bill Bryson and I were born a year apart, and as baby boomers growing up in the 50's and 60's, I found this memoir to be a trip down memory lane. He talks about his mom's bad cooking, his strange relatives, going to the store for penny candy (candy cigarettes), playing outdoors until dark, first crushes, Saturday at the movies, loss of innocence etc. He could be describing a whole lot of baby boomers in this memoir. This book is hysterical, and there were many times I had tears in my eyes from laughing so hard. The audio version is highly recommended.

It is a constant theme in Bill Bryson's books - he always points out what is (or in this case, was) good and enjoyable about his life's experiences. His exaggerations are done for comedic effect, but also to illustrate a point. I always leave the confines of his pages feeling like I have been transported to a different place or different time. Have we become so consumed with what we have, what we want, and how to get them that we have lost many of the enjoyments in life, or is it that being an adult just isn't as much fun as being a kid?

I'll have Bill know that because of him I won't be doing my part to contribute to our consumer-driven economy. I'm putting off enlarging and vastly improving the size and quality of my TV. More money for books, I suppose...

Too funny! I was born in the 60's, but this book has given me a thorough understanding of life in the 50's - all the innocence and fun. So interesting, but mainly, laugh out loud funny! Fun for young adults and older folks, this book will appeal to any age who wants at least a couple of laughs PER PAGE! Definitely worth reading, in fact, I have ordered his other books as a result. Impressive writer.

A laugh out loud look at a boy growing up in Iowa in the 1950s. A wonderful nostalgic look at life through a boy's eyes. For anyone who grew up in the fifties this is the ticket for a trip down memory lane. This is a wonderful get well gift as laughter aids in healing and relieving pain. I challenge anyone to read this and not laugh out loud. This is Bill Bryson at his best and who could ask for more.

Approximately normal, but at times excessively disgusting, Bryson gives us the frog's perspective to Halberstam's magnificent bird's eye view of the Fifties.
Bryson's specific kind of humour, the exaggeration to absurdity of nearly everything, can be very funny, but also trying. Boys will be boys, so they do odd things, but when you exaggerate them, they go a bit out of their normal frame. Some of his stories are plain yukki. (eating buttered popcorn in a cinema while peeling something soft away from underneath the chair? crawling underneath the toilet partitions to lock all doors from the inside? watching the man with the hole in his throat while he eats and speaks? etc ad nauseam, literally)
So the fun is there but not always.
Apart from that, my main reason to read the book is the fact that Bryson grew up with a dad who was a sports reporter, and in Bryson's surely not exaggerated recollection the greatest American baseball reporter ever. Now that I have resigned from my less than promising career as a reviewer at Amazon.de to focus fully on Amazon.com, I realized that I have no clue why you guys like baseball so much.
After Bryson, I still don't have a clue, but I learned one thing: it must help to have grown up with it. I guess I will never make it even to the outer circles of the half-initiated.

I have sent Bill Bryson's books to a number of friends & relatives. Truly, he cracks me up.

This was a bit of a disappointment. I was in Nevada, Iowa (age 5), @ the same time he was in Des Moines. We come from the same place.

It was never the best of times, in Iowa.

I left the book with a friend who's a sports writer. She didn't know about Bryson's dad, also a sports writer, a good one, & was intrigued.

Bill Bryson makes me snort my drink out my nose most of the time. This book did tell me who his companion was in A Walk In The Woods was.

A Walk In The Woods was TOO, too funny.

Bill Bryson writes in a way that brings his book to life. I actually see whats going on rather than imagine it. And while he wrote this book with an obvious adult retrospective - he spices it up with a child's perspective also. Everything is "the best", "the biggest", "600 kids on the baseball field" - over-exaggerating things like kids are known to do. I found myself rereading paragraphs simply for the delight of it!

Funny, but overall not as entertaining as Bryson's other works like A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail or I'm a Stranger Here Myself: Notes on Returning to America After 20 Years Away.

It's hard for me to put my finger on it -- it's definitely still a Bryson book and has his signature style. But it reminds me of when a great baseball player is in a hitting slump -- you know it's still him when he walks to the plate, but the end result just isn't as impressive.

If you're a Bryson devotee, you'll probably read the book anyway. Just know in advance that he isn't bringing his A-game. If you're new to Bryson, go ahead and read "The Thunderbolt Kid" -- Bryson bringing his B-game is still better than most other writers bringing their A-game. And once you read one Bryson book, you'll find you just can't stop.

This is a wonderful read.....nostalgic, funny, sentimental, but never sappy. If you are NOT a fan of the "big box chains," then this is a book for you.

A father who's a top sports columnist. Wax teeth, the Butter Boys, infatuation with atomic energy, and a booming post-war economy. Is it any wonder that Bill Bryson (the second) turned out the way he did? Reading this crazy essay is a walk down memory lane for baby boomers. Who could forget crawling under a school desk to ward off the effects of a nuclear attack by communists? Or the rise of rock and roll? Bryson recalls and describes it all in his typical dry, wry, and deadpan way. I did not laugh my way all the way through it - that only happened maybe once in each chapter - but I never stopped smiling. Great fun.

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, (AA 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 sanitizedby 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.

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)."

This book is Hilarious! I recommend this memoir to all my friends that love to read. The book is well written. Read this you will love it too.

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.

The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid: A Memoir

Our memories tend to be unreliable :-) so Bill Bryson brings back all those funny things from childhood that I hadn't thought about in years! Nor had my mom, who thoroughly enjoyed it, too.

And some things -- like the McCarthy era measures - I hadn't really read about at all. (Seems the more some things change, the more they stay the same.)

A really good book - and a great present for every boomer on my list!

Seldom have I ever read a book which was (a)dead on for those of us who grew up in the 50's and (b)absolutely laugh out loud funny because of it! Life was indeed, pretty innocent then! I kept having to read excerpts to my family so they would know why I was laughing so hard with tears streaming down my face! Highly recommended for any baby boomer who grew up in that era!

HAVE A FUN TIME WITH BRYSON'S BOOK I COULDN'T KEEP TRACK OF THE NUMBER OF TIMES I LAUGHED OUTLOUD AND ADDED I DID THAT OR I REMEMBER THAT

This is one of the funniest books I've read in years. It is so good I purchased 8 copies to hand out to my friends.

I've previously read Bryson's earlier work, Notes from a Small Island; that book kept me in stitches. Thunderbolt Kid did the same. Bryson has the rare gift of being able to take everyday events and turn them into hilariously-told episodes. He uses hyperbole in a very controlled way and his humor is always good-natured. Now I want to read more of his work.

Bill Bryson's The Life & Times of the Thunderbolt Kid took me back to my own childhood in a way no book ever has. With exquisite prose that elicits tears at times, uproarious laughter at others, Bryson leads us on a journey to a simpler--yet far more entertaining--time, a time when serial TV and treehouses took the place of DVDs and Nintendo. As a 'Baby Boomer' myself ('64), I appreciate his vivid recollections--the colossal department stores, the chaotic movie matinees, the thrills of the state fair--some of them dead-on, others exaggerated for effect. All in all, this is a great read! Salmon Run

The only difficulty I had in reading this book was extracting it from my wife. This book has Lake Wobegon's optimistic take on growing up in a small town, and was a pleasure to read.

It is set 5-10 years early than my own childhood, but nearly every page resonated with forgotten memories of growing up. Our fascination with anemic toys, naive view of other kids and especially the opposite sex, parental tyranny, joys, experiments with alcohol, and tedium of visits to the relatives and summer vacations - it is all here.

Even the few interspersed, dead-serious send-ups of our foreign policy fiascos of the time like the Bay of Pigs, the Cuban missile crisis, and the space race were cast with an unerring aim for accuracy and surreality.

I recommend Thunderbolts without reservation.

(As a girl growing up in the Midwest in the 50s) I always wondered what the guys in my age group were thinking...do I know now! But I still don't quite grasp their need to grasp those budding girl parts. Bryson keeps little about the young male mind a secret. It is a great book for a long plane ride, or hours spent waiting for a delayed flight. There is no complicated plot. So,you can be sitting right next to a bubba who has to use his cell phone right in your ear and not lose your train of thought. Entertainment at your fingertips,good laugh out loud now and then; great writing.

Bill Bryson has been one of my favorite authors for years and this book doesn't let me down. Even though I don't fit in the baby boomer category (I was born in 1967), I had a lot of older cousins and friends, so I feel more of the baby boomer generation than my own. This book brought back great memories, possible more from stories of my cousins than my own, as the age of innocence changed to the Vietnam war era. Living in a small town, hanging out at a rural relatives house, the quirky tv programming back then, candy cigarettes (what were we thinking?!?), ... to be a kid again ... back then, not now, thank you.

A great book for the older set. Kids born in the 70s and 80s probably won't get the humor, unless they have an interest in history but for the rest of us old folks ... get a copy ... it's worth it!

What initially caught my eye about this book is the cover. It's not often you see a kid from the 1950's with a flannel shirt and spaceman helmet and ray-gun on a book cover.

I picked it up and randomly turned to a page, which just happened to be a description of electric football games. You know, the game vibrates and all the little football players rattle around until they congregate into one corner...game over. But it wasn't "game over" for this book. I was hooked.

This is one funny and entertaining book. If truth is truely stranger than fiction, it's also funnier. Who knew that growing up in the 1950's in middle America, Iowa to be specific, could be so entertaining.

On top of the great material, Bill Bryson is an excellent writer. His tales of the Willoughby brothers are howlingly funny. I discovered they are even funnier when read aloud as I tried to read them to my wife. Bryson is a gifted wordsmith. His description of his elementary school's gym not only brings it to life, but puts you right there. That passage alone should be required reading for all students as an example of how writing should look.

I recommend That's How the Light Gets In: Memoir of a Psychiatrist by Susan Rako, M.D. The title comes from a song by Leonard Cohen: "There is a crack, a crack in everything. That's how the light gets in." Rako's book is extraordinarily insightful, gracefully written, and an overall great read. The writing just flows.

In the middle of the country in the middle of the 20th century lived a small boy and his alter ego. His adventures are recollected, coupled with the events of the day, to recreate a time when all the skies were sunny and all the evils contained, all the dinners served on TV trays and all the nights cold and snuggly. It is a lovely balance of social history, personal nostalgia and hyperbole. It was a gazillion years ago and I remember it well.

This is great book of light reading. It really is a laugh out loud book.
I enjoyed it and would recommend it to anyone who wants to relax and have a good laugh.

Even though this is the era in which my parents grew up, and not me, I thoroughly enjoyed this memoir and would recommend it to people of all ages. While I'm sure the baby boomer generation would really find this book resonating with their life experiences, I think its an intersting look at a unique and fascinating time in our country's history and will appeal to a much wider audience, such as myself (I'm in my late 20's).

The author is hysterical and I found myself laughing out loud throughout the book. It was so interesting to learn about growing up in Des Moines in the 50s - everything from what people ate to how they shopped to the trouble kids and teens got into- it is indeed such a stark contrast to growing up in America today, regardless of where you live.

I think this book would make a particularly great book club selection and would also be interesting reading for history classes or classes on American culture, etc. I HIGHLY recommend it!

I was hoping for and expecting the usual Bryson hold-your-sides, uncontrolled laughter. I found it to be a pleasant read, which evoked half a dozen chuckles, but nothing like much of his previous works.

Bryson writes brilliantly on serious subjects, e.g. A short History of Nearly Everything, but does a very funny take on his own Iowan childhood. Delightful book.

"Getting into the strippers' tent would become the principal preoccupation of my pubescent years." - Bill Bryson in THUNDERBOLT KID

"Essentially matinees were an invitation to four thousand children to riot for four hours in a large darkened space." - Bill Bryson in THUNDERBOLT KID

As I mature gracefully, reading the coming-of-age reminiscences of others that grew up about the same time I did - the 1950s - becomes an absorbing leisure activity. Perhaps I just need to supplement my failing memory with theirs. In any case, several fine volumes of the genre come to mind: Blooming: A Small-Town Girlhood by Susan Allen Toth, Sleeping Arrangements by Laura Shaine Cunningham, When All the World Was Young: A Memoir by Barbara Holland, and Wait Till Next Year: A Memoir by Doris Kearns Goodwin. As you may have noticed, all four of these are by female authors who are recalling their girlhood. On the other hand, THE LIFE AND TIMES OF THE THUNDERBOLT KID, by Bill Bryson, is all about boyhood. And, as I think you'll agree, boys are an entirely different species from girls. I should know as I used to be one of the former. For example, boys have a propensity for shenanigans that would elicit an "Eeeuw!" from the gentler sex, as the following passage on Lincoln Logs, of which I myself had a set, illustrates:

"What Buddy Doberman and I discovered was that if you peed on Lincoln Logs you bleached them white. As a result we created, over a period of weeks, the world's first albino Lincoln Log cabin, which we took to school as part of a project on Abraham Lincoln's early years."

Or this regarding the elementary school's space heaters:

"The most infamous radiator-based activity was of course to pee on the radiator in one of the boys' bathrooms. This created an enormous sour stink that permeated whole wings of the school for days on end and could not be got rid of through any amount of scrubbing or airing."

I'm virtually certain that Susan, Laura, Barbara and Doris never did either.

Bill's recollections otherwise ran the gamut of those of any kid of either sex from that era: family vacations, the first televisions, favorite TV shows, the nature of contemporary comic books, toys, soda pop and candies, parents' occupations and eccentricities, Mom's cooking, the specter of The Bomb and Godless Communism, drop and cover drills, Saturday afternoons at the movie matinees, the National Pastime (major league baseball), the State Fair, Dick and Jane books, visits to Grandpa's farm, paper routes, strange relatives, and Best Friends. Oddly, there's no mention anywhere of a family pet. Is it that he never had one? How is this possible?

Then, of course, there's the budding fascination with sex that includes the discovery of Ol' Dad's secret stash of girlie mags and the unfulfilled, feverish desire to see play pal Mary O'Leary nekkid.

As in the author's other books, his ability to tell the story with a wry and self-deprecating wit is unmatched by any contemporary writer that I've read with the exception of Barbara Holland. Both are national treasures.

Bryson's young adventures took place in Des Moines, Iowa, a much different environment than the Southern California in which I had mine. But, there's a degree of similarity that transcends region so long as that region lies in the U.S. of A. One of Bill's nostalgias in particular that I wouldn't have recalled in a million years but is oh, so true was:

"Of all the tragic losses since the 1950s, mimeograph paper may be the greatest. With its rapturously fragrant, sweetly aromatic pale blue ink, mimeograph paper was literally intoxicating."

It's in the nature of the aging human to recall previous times as so much better. Nowadays, as we're inundated with rampant political correctness, discredited heroes, and the pathetic likes of Paris, Britney and Lindsay, I can look back and say about many things, as Bill does:

"... I saw the last of something really special. It's something I seem to say a lot these days."

This was my first Bill Bryson book after hearing rave reviews from friends about his work. This is truly a laugh out loud book. Very witty and endearing account of the innocent life in a middle class family in the midwest in the middle of last century. A fast and easy read - and you WILL LOL! :-)

This was not an average middle class family.
I was expecting maybe a farm family which was more typical of Iowa in 1960

I've not read Bill Bryson before, but I certainly look forward to reading him again. This book is one that I set my eyes on when it first came out, but didn't pull the trigger. Fortunately, my wife bought it for me as a Christmas gift this year and I read the book in 3-4 days, which is extremely fast for me at least. I laughed out loud at times as the humor is extremely witty. Emotions moved in different directions dependent upon what Bryson described. I was able to relate to my own experiences to some degree even though I grew up a decade later. This was a bonus and not a prerequisite to enjoying this book. This book was a true pleasure to read and immediately becomes one of my favorite books. I have tendencies to read non-fiction, WWII books, and heavier fiction if you will. This was an absolute exception to that and I'm thankful I was given the opportunity. I look forward to experiencing more Bryson books. Highly recommended for anyone looking for something to bring a smile to their face.

Other reviewers have summarized this memoir quite well, so I won't go into details about that here. But suffice it to say that this book, like Bryson's other works, is absolutely hilarious. Well written, charming, with laugh-out-loud moments you'll want to share. I read this memoir in one sitting!

This book brought back so many memories of growing up in the fifties and had me laughing so hard that tears rolled down my face. I had to buy it and send it to my best friend of the era and he loved it too. I highly recommend it to anyone born in the 40's or 50's. Others will enjoy it as well, but probably will not understand all the quirks of the time.

I'm a big fan of Bryson's previous work, and I believe this one would have been just as good if I weren't only 28 years old. I couldn't relate to his stories enough to get the hilarity of this that Baby Boomers will. I still chuckled a lot since the stories are still humorous, they just would be more so if you also had experienced these things yourself. If you're of the younger generations like me, this might not be your best bet for Bill Bryson. Try "I'm a Stranger Here Myself" or "Notes from a Small Island," (the 2nd especially if you've ever traveled in the UK).

Hilarious..this is for anyone who grew up in the early 50's..being from the mid west helps but is not essential. People in the airplane around me probably thought I was on drugs..continual chuckles with laugh out loud moments.

My husband and I listen to this on CD on a recent road trip. At one point I had to pull off to the side of the road because I was laughing so hard I couldn't see straight! Although Bryson is best known for Walk in the Woods, I think this book is funnier and more insightful. I think this will eventually be the book he is most known for. I bought several copies of the print version for christmas presents and will probably by more for birthday presents in 2008.

I have read two other books by Bryson and enjoyed them but wasn't sure I'd like this, probably because it was about being a child in the fifties (my childhood experiences were in the seventies) in Iowa America (I'm in Yorkshire, England) however I shouldn't have doubted his talent for relating life experiences to just about everyone.

I laughed out loud at his father's out of character taking the family to Disneyland as well as the motley crew of childhood relatives and friends he describes.
He could actually be describing any of our childhoods, from teenage crushes, the hierarchy of a gang of mates, Saturday morning cinema, comics and school. Which ever western country you grew up in you no doubt learnt to read from a book where 'Father' always wore a suit and 'Mother' a frilly apron and everyone said "look" at the beginning of each sentence!!

As well as being informative about 1950's America, it's a really entertaining read for those who like to look back happily on their childhood.

Bill Bryson's "Thunderbolt Kid" is the funniest, cleverest, most entertaining memoir I've read. It will resonate with every American over 45 (okay, 50). When he writes of the disappearance of ornate old theaters and family-owned businesses, he could be referring to any city anywhere in the country.

Roger L. Conlee, author of "Counterclockwise" and "Every Shape, Every Shadow"

To any of you out there who remember and liked Jean Shepard's book "In God We Trust - All Others Pay Cash" - and for those of you that never heard nor read Shepard's book or of Shepard himself, then you owe it to yourself to read this great memior of a baby boomer growing up in the Mid-west during the 50's - Bryson is very much like Jean Shepard - writing and conveying in a masterful sense what it was like growing up as a pre-adolescent in another time. Although I am about the same age as Bryson, I do remember listening to Jean Shepard on the radio and also reading his books as a teenager which transported me back into the 40's and Jean's adolescence - and Bryson, really does just a good of a job as Shepard - only I could connect more with the pop culture of the 50's more than the 40's - some great writing here - and a phenominal style that makes you laugh to yourself (and to others as well) when reading this great piece of nostalgia.

It's a fun and fast read - and anyone of any age can appreciate it. Go ahead and get ahold of this book - you won't regret it once you start reading it - it is hard to put down and not think about what you read in each chapter.

Buy it, Read it, Enjoy it!

I am the product of the late 50's early 60's. I could so relate. I loved the book.

I'm just now reading Bryson's works and am enjoying the process. Thunderbolt Kid took me back in time. The details of his memoirs are well researched and presented in a lively, fun way. From the names of the candy bars to the tassels some women wore - it's all there. He reminds us of the the thoughts we thought and the pranks we carried off. There are hundred's of similar items that trigger memories of childhood - several showing up each time you turn a page. His descriptions are familiar, comfortable and quite funny. This is a book you will reread a second time.

"The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid" is an entertaining romp through the wonderfully complex, and yet simple, world of a child of the 1950s. Though I grew up in Detroit in the 1980s, I was still able to identify with a number of things the author discussed, as I believe they are universal truths when it comes to a boy's life and his quests for knowledge, acceptance, and superherodom. My only complaint about the book, and it is indeed a small, but easily rectifiable one, would be the last chapter. In his conclusion, the author puts a bit of his modern political stanses into the otherwise almost unbiased memoir. There are a few such comments throughout the narrative, as well as a couple apologetic moments on behalf of the entire era, but other than those and the last chapter, it mostly focuses on the memoir-at-hand, and I recommend this book to anyone who was ever a kid!

Bill Bryson's books are always wonderful, but this is a cheeky, nostalgic look at growing up in the 50s that is lovingly crafted and full belly-laugh entertaining. I highly recommend this easy, heartfelt, wonderful read.

This is an entertaining trip down memory lane for any male born between 1950 and 1965. It brought back fond memories of days spent exploring the community on bicycle. It also mentions games and toys that were unique to the 50's and 60's. It truly documents what were for me and many men my age, "the good old days".