Customer Reviews: Read 44 more reviews...
 The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid: A Memoir July 14, 2008
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.
 Des Moines' own local hero in defense of a boy's right to be dirty July 11, 2008
18 out of 24 found this review helpful
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.
 not bill's best July 9, 2008
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.
 Bryson brings his B-game June 30, 2008
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
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.
Wonderful writing style! June 30, 2008
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!
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