The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid
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Hardcover - UK - 1st edition. |
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The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid: A Memoir is the childhood memoirs of Bill Bryson published on 2006-10-17.
The book details the life of the author growing up in Des Moines, Iowa in the 1950s and 60s, mostly focuses on his elementary and middle school years. The book also includes a lot of history of Des Moines and some of the United States in general during that time.
Personal
| Own? | Hardcover - USA - 1st edition. |
|---|---|
| Read? | Hardcover - USA - 1st edition. |
| Finished | 2024-07-02. |
I had read several of Bryson's books, and, while I only really liked a couple, I enjoyed all of them. This book didn't sound all that interesting to me from the title, but, when I saw a hardcover first edition on sale at a used book store, I was eager to get it.
Review
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Overall: |
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Good
- The list of foods his family didn't eat is both hilarious and depressing.
- The description of building model airplanes reminds me of my own failed attempts.
- He points out several times how the fears of the general public rarely had anything to do with the actual problems of the time. For example, people were beginning to panic over teenagers fearing they weren't as Conservative as they should be, meanwhile the US government was coating them with a thin layer of cancer-causing radioactive dust, a result of literally hundreds of nuclear bomb tests within the states.
- Many other atrocities committed by the American government are recounted in all their bigoted glory, and Bryson, although he doesn't spend much time on it, includes multiple examples of the horrifying racism that took place in the good 'ol days.
Bad
- Although Bryson's exaggerations are usually funny, the lack of accurate information means most of the "facts" you read in the book are just jokes. And, since he doesn't clearly differentiate between when he's telling the truth and exaggerating for comedic effect, it's very hard to trust anything he actually intends to be factual.
- Bryson says he almost never witnessed any oppressive racism while also pointing out that the city he grew up in was exclusively white, and the few black people he ever saw were always poor. This illustrates a common problem where people think racism only exists as individuals actively attacking those of a different race, while not realizing that systemic racism looks much different: exactly like what he saw.
Ugly
- Nothing.
Media
Covers
Hardcover - UK - 1st edition.
Hardcover - USA - 1st edition.
Quotes
- "It's a bit burned," my mother would say apologetically at every meal, presenting you with a piece of meat that looked like something — a much-loved pet perhaps — salvaged from a tragic house fire.
- That was the glory of living in a world that was still largely free of global chains. Every community was special and nowhere was like everywhere else. If our commercial enterprises in Des Moines weren't the best, they were at least ours.
- My father was a fiend for piling us all in the car and going to distant places, but only if the trips were cheap, educational, and celebrated some forgotten aspect of America's glorious past, generally involving slaughter, uncommon hardship, or the delivery of mail at a gallop.
- To my surprise, the shades were drawn and my parents were in bed wrestling under the sheets. More astonishing still, my mother was winning.
- He had, as he would boast in later years, a pornographic memory.
- I was appalled and astonished, not because my father had men's magazines — this was an entirely welcome development, of course; one to be encouraged by any means possible — but because he had chosen so poorly. It seemed tragically typical of my father that his crippling cheapness extended even to his choice of men's magazines.
- The main dishes were complemented by a table of brightly colored Jell-Os, the state fruit...
- "Ever seen a tornado up close, Billy?" my father said to me, smiling weirdly. I stared at him in amazement. Of course not and I didn't want to.
- Suddenly we were in a world where something horribly destructive could drop on us at any moment without warning wherever we were. This was a startling and unsettling notion, and we responded in a quintessentially 1950s way. We got excited about it.
- A quarter of young American males were in the armed forces in 1968. Nearly all the rest were in school, in prison, or were George W. Bush.
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