**From one of the world's most beloved writers and New York Times
bestselling author of A Walk in the Woods and The Body, a vivid,
nostalgic, and utterly hilarious memoir of growing up in the 1950s.
**
Bill Bryson was born in the middle of the American century--1951--in the
middle of the United States--Des Moines, Iowa--in the middle of the
largest generation in American history--the baby boomers. As one of the
best and funniest writers alive, he is perfectly positioned to mine his
memories of a totally all-American childhood for 24-carat memoir gold.
Like millions of his generational peers, Bill Bryson grew up with a rich
fantasy life as a superhero. In his case, he ran around his house and
neighborhood with an old football jersey with a thunderbolt on it and a
towel about his neck that served as his cape, leaping tall buildings in
a single bound and vanquishing awful evildoers (and morons)--in his
head--as "The Thunderbolt Kid."
Using this persona as a springboard, Bill Bryson re-creates the life of
his family and his native city in the 1950s in all its transcendent
normality--a life at once completely familiar to us all and as far away
and unreachable as another galaxy. It was, he reminds us, a happy time,
when automobiles and televisions and appliances (not to mention nuclear
weapons) grew larger and more numerous with each passing year, and DDT,
cigarettes, and the fallout from atmospheric testing were considered
harmless or even good for you. He brings us into the life of his loving
but eccentric family, including affectionate portraits of his father, a
gifted sportswriter for the local paper and dedicated practitioner of
isometric exercises, and of his mother, whose job as the home furnishing
editor for the same paper left her little time for practicing the
domestic arts at home. The many readers of Bill Bryson's earlier
classic, A Walk in the Woods, will greet the reappearance in these
pages of the immortal Stephen Katz, seen hijacking literally boxcar
loads of beer. He is joined in the Bryson gallery of immortal characters
by the demonically clever Willoughby brothers, who apply their
scientific skills and can-do attitude to gleefully destructive ends.
Warm and laugh-out-loud funny, and full of his inimitable, pitch-perfect
observations, The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid is as wondrous
a book as Bill Bryson has ever written. It will enchant anyone who has
ever been young.
