• Bill Bryson The Life And Times Of The Thunderbolt Kid Book
• Bill Bryson The Life And Times Of The Thunderbolt Kid
• Bill Bryson The Life And Times Of The Thunderbolt Kidney Disease

In his case, he ran around the house wearing a jersey with a thunderbolt on it and a towel round his neck that served as his cape, leaping tall buildings in a single bound and vanquishing evildoers (in his head) as The Thunderbolt Kid. Using his old fantasy life as a springboard, Bill Bryson recreates the life of his family in the 1950s in all its transcendent normality. “While many memoirs convey a bittersweet nostalgia, Bill Bryson’s loving look at his childhood in The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid is genuinely sweet. Framed within young Bryson’s fantasy of being a superhero, it matches the author’s sparkling wit with his vivid, candid memories of 1950s America. And Bill Bryson is a surefire spirits-lifter, whether he?s summarizing the secrets of the universe in A Short History of Nearly Everything or expanding his own galaxy of personal anecdotes in The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid: A Memoir. In large part, The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid: A Memoir is about childhood. Bryson writes about the events and feelings he had growing up in Des Moines during the 1950s. For the most part, Bill's childhood is a good one. Nothing bad really happens, although there are larger threats that he is aware of.

The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid is a 2006memoir by best-selling travelwriterBill Bryson. The book delves into Bryson's past, telling of his youth growing up in Des Moines, Iowa, during the 1950s and early 1960s. It also reveals the backstory between himself and Stephen Katz, who appeared in A Walk in the Woods and 'Neither Here Nor There: Travels in Europe.'^[1] Bryson also describes and comments on American life in the 1950s. The title of the book comes from an imaginary alter-ego Bryson invented for himself in his childhood, who has the ability to vaporise people.^{[citation needed]}

The book was released on September 1, 2006, in the United Kingdom, where it was published by Doubleday.^[2] In the United States and Canada, the book was launched on October 17, 2006,^[3] and was published by Broadway Books^[1] and Doubleday Canada respectively.^[4]

Plot[edit]

Bryson was born on December 8, 1951. He spent his childhood growing up in Des Moines, Iowa, part of the baby-boom generation born in the post-war years. He describes his early life and his parents, Bill Sr. and Mary Bryson. His father was a well-known sports writer for The Des Moines Register, the leading newspaper in Des Moines. His mother was also a writer for the Register, she also wrote for magazines like Better Homes and Gardens, Good Housekeeping, and House Beautiful.

He recounts many things that were invented during his childhood that fascinated him, which include frozen dinners, atomic toilets, and television. His middle-class, all-American lifestyle is shown constantly throughout the book, and the influence of his depression-era raised parents rubs off on him. He also remembers his adventures as 'the Thunderbolt Kid,' an alter ego he made up for himself when he felt powerless. He was able to vaporize people with his heat vision and thought that he came from another planet. He tells amusing stories of his misadventures as Billy Bryson, including his first days in school when he figured out that when the entire class was running drills to protect themselves from a bomb, he would simply read comic books instead. However, when the principal and a police officer came in one day to supervise, he got in trouble. Trouble was something fairly common for 'the Thunderbolt Kid', as throughout his childhood his teachers were unamused by his activities. In fact, Bryson recounts how he really was uninterested in getting up before noon, thus not even going to school very often. Despite his unique behavior, Bryson tells his story through the eyes of a child, filled with hilarious observations about the world — from 'Lumpy' Kowalski's curious nickname to the joy that was to be had in the department stores.

Though Bryson focuses mostly on his childhood, he tells of many of the events that were happening at the time, including the development of the atomic bomb, and the beginnings of the civil rights movement. He tells of his first days in junior high and high school, and during both he began smoking, drinking, and stealing, although he didn’t get caught for any of it. He met Stephen Katz in junior high school, when they were both in the school's audio-visual club. Katz would accompany Bryson on many of his travel experiences. At the end of the book, Bryson tells the reader that 'life moves on', and that he wishes that the world could be more similar to life in the 1950s and 1960s. The last lines of the book are, 'What a wonderful world that would be. What a wonderful world it was. We won’t see its like again, I'm afraid.'

Bill Bryson The Life And Times Of The Thunderbolt Kid Book

Reception[edit]

The book received mostly positive reviews from critics. Carole Cadwalladr of The Observer wrote 'What Bryson has achieved with this book is final confirmation that he is the Frank Capra of American letters', and later added 'And it really is a wonderful life to be immersed in the American Midwest in the Fifties with Bill as your tour guide [...] Bryson has to pad his tale with other stuff. And it's the other stuff at which he excels.'^[5] Ian Sansom of The Guardian stated 'He has a natural-seeming style in which he doesn't so much tell jokes as let his sentences stretch out and relax into feet-up, contented good humour.' and 'Bryson's descriptions of 50s Des Moines [...] makes you wish that you could emigrate, become a child, get a flat-top haircut and some long-laced baseball boots, and sneak in and take up residence unnoticed with little Billy Bryson in his parents' household.'^[6] The only complaint Tom Fort of The Daily Telegraph made about the autobiography was that 'His handicap is that he is entirely free of the malice, the appetite for smut, scandal and unpleasantness — above all, the narcissism — absolutely essential to the form.'^[7]

The book has a 73/100 rating at the website Metacritic, earning it the rank of 'Generally favorable reviews'.^[8]

Editions[edit]

• ISBN0-7679-1936-X (US hardcover, 2006)
• ISBN0-385-60826-8 (UK hardcover, 2006)
• ISBN0-385-66161-4 (CDN hardcover, 2006)
• ISBN0-7679-1937-8 (US paperback, 2007)
• ISBN978-0-552-77254-9 (UK paperback, 2007)
• ISBN0-385-66162-2 (CDN paperback, 2007)
• ISBN0-7393-1523-4 (US audiobook, 2006)
• ISBN978-0-552-15365-2 (UK audiobook, 2006)

References[edit]

1. ^ ^ab'The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid'. Random House. Retrieved 2009-10-14.CS1 maint: discouraged parameter (link)
2. ^'The Life And Times Of The Thunderbolt Kid by Bill Bryson'. Transworld. The Random House Group Limited. Retrieved 2009-10-14.CS1 maint: discouraged parameter (link)
3. ^'Amazon.com page'. Retrieved 2009-10-14.CS1 maint: discouraged parameter (link)
4. ^'The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid'. Random House.ca. Random House of Canada limited. Retrieved 2009-10-14.CS1 maint: discouraged parameter (link)
5. ^Cadwalladr, Carole (24 September 2006). 'Face to face with Iowa's bustiest barmaid'. The Observer. Retrieved 2009-09-17.CS1 maint: discouraged parameter (link)
6. ^Ian Sansom (7 October 2006). 'The living was easy'. The Guardian. Retrieved 2009-09-17.CS1 maint: discouraged parameter (link)
7. ^Fort, Tom (24 September 2006). 'The shiny, happy world of his childhood'. Telegraph.co.uk. Telegraph Media Group Limited. Retrieved 2009-10-15.CS1 maint: discouraged parameter (link)
8. ^'The Life And Times Of The Thunderbolt Kid A Memoir by Bill Bryson'. Metacritic.com. CBS Interactive. Retrieved 2009-10-14.CS1 maint: discouraged parameter (link)

Book Summary

A vivid, nostalgic and utterly hilarious memoir of growing up in the middle of the United States in the middle of the last century. A book that delivers on the promise that it is 'laugh-out-loud funny'.

Bill Bryson The Life And Times Of The Thunderbolt Kid

Bill Bryson The Life And Times Of The Thunderbolt Kidney Disease

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 middle of the United States in the middle of the last century. A book that delivers on the promise that it is “laugh-out-loud funny.”
Some say that the first hints that Bill Bryson was not of Planet Earth came from his discovery, at the age of six, of a woollen jersey of rare fineness. Across the moth-holed chest was a golden thunderbolt. It may have looked like an old college football sweater, but young Bryson knew better. It was obviously the Sacred Jersey of Zap, and proved that he had been placed with this innocuous family in the middle of America to fly, become invisible, shoot guns out of people’s hands from a distance, and wear his underpants over his jeans in the manner of Superman.
Bill Bryson’s first travel book opened with the immortal line, “I come from Des Moines. Somebody had to.” In this hilarious new memoir, he travels back to explore the kid he once was and the weird and wonderful world of 1950s America. He modestly claims that this is a book about not very much: about being small and getting much larger slowly. But for the rest of us, it is a laugh-out-loud book that will speak volumes – especially to anyone who has ever been young.