Books The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid: A Memoir
Books and Publications Average Rating:

Rating: - One of Bill Bryson's Funniest Books
One of Bill Bryson's funniest books. Autobiographical stories of his childhood. Get it on tape and listen aloud. Then you can crack up with other people. Read it by yourself, and you get weird looks from people on the subway while you hold back laughter. The choice is yours. GET THIS BOOK.

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Rating: - Funny but audio version not helped by author's voice
I listened to the audio version, narrated by the author. Bryson is a great humorist but not a great narrator. His voice is soft and has an unusual accent, most likely due to his having lived in England for most of his adult life. Still, I recommend the book if you are a baby boomer in a nostalgic mood. Bryson gives a very humorous picture of growing up in the fifties.

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Rating: - The Thunderbolt Kid
What an enjoyable read. Brought back all the wonderful memories of childhood along with an adult slant about the world today. Every chapter a treat.

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Rating: - Did He Mistakenly Combine Two Different Books?
I have read several of Bryson's books, the most recent being his able essay on Shakespeare, but this one I found almost disturbing. The book is supposedly about growing up in Des Moines (Bryson was born in 1951) and part of the book is about that. But lots is not. There are hypercritical and one sided rants on US policy in the Cold War, on the anti-communist hysteria of the 1950's and a number of other aspects of life in the 1950's of which Bryson disapproves. Now some of these things are pretty soft targets and deserve some measure of abuse, but the rants are not relating the experience of the very young boy who experienced the times. They are the views of an adult evaluating the times and an angry adult at that.

Some of the parts that are about growing up in Des Moines are fairly funny, but they are just as frequently nasty and are often fueled by anger as well. Bryson is thoroughly unkind to many of the people that he describes in the book. The funny parts were not enough to me to counterbalance the nasty. Overall the book reeks of an arrogant superiority that I have not found in other Bryson books. His other books did not seem to me to be mean spirited. This one does.