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The first chapter or two were merely OK, but I trudged on and am glad I did. I am 40, but I had no trouble relating to the stories and experiences in the book. As a fan of A Christmas Story, I read some of Jean Shepard's books. There were times that absolutely killed me. There were so many hilarious stories, I hated to put the book down.I have read 2 other Bryson books (Walk in the Woods & In a Sunburned Country), but The Life and Times is my favorite so far. Some were funny, others were OK. As I scoured Amazon in search of other similar works, Bryson's Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid kept appearing in the lists, so I bought it.
But there is very little in the book that is sentimental or endearing. So, despite a couple spookily similar escapades/situations to my own upbringing, there was really nothing that engaging about many of the tales.
I laughed out loud only twice and a humor book should do much, much better than that. The beginning, in particular, is quite slow and there is an occasional harshness of tone elsewhere that is out-of-keeping with the supposedly humorous tone.
I'm a big fan of Bill Bryson's In a Sunburned Country. And neither Bill nor his childhood friends come across as very likeable.
Not terrible--and occasionally interesting and amusing--but not what I was hoping for. And, since I was born in the mid-fifties in the midwest, I really expected The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid to be both endearing and laugh-out-loud funny.
In fact, aside for a genuine fondness for hid dad's baseball writing, there is very, very little interaction with his family.
It also has a couple chapters that make you think seriously. This is a laugh-out-loud book. Everyone in the club loved it. I chose this for my book club. Even those who grew up outside the Midwest could relate.
You can't help but agree with his concluding sentiment. We didn't need seat belts, air bags, smoke detectors, bottled water, or the Heimlich maneuver." But with the Cold War at full swing, we were also constantly reminded that we might be blown to bits at any moment by a long-range ballistic missile armed with a nuclear warhead, launched our way compliments of the Soviet Union.He remembers his boyhood friends and the wacky games they played, the coming of television, Sputnik, and rigged quiz shows. A picture from Life magazine that opens the book, for example, shows a typical blue-collar family of four surrounded by the two and a half tons of food they would eat in a year, including "450 pounds of flour, 72 pounds of shortening, 56 pounds of butter, 31 chickens, 300 pounds of beef, 25 pounds of carp,144 pounds of ham, 39 pounds of coffee, 690 pounds of potatoes, 698 quarts of milk, 131 dozen eggs, 180 loaves of bread, and 8-1/2 gallons of ice cream." We Americans ate 50 percent more than the Europeans of the 1950s. "What a wonderful world it was. He opens one chapter with a full-page ad for Camel cigarettes featuring a picture of a smiling doctor, a stethoscope draped around his neck, a Camel cigarette in his hand, and the caption, "More Doctors Smoke Camels Than Any Other Cigarette." Bryson has fun simply reminding us who we were back in those good old days. Bill Bryson is a very funny writer.
Sometimes, all he has to do is cite certain statistics of the times to get a laugh. What great fun it is reliving those years through the keen and comic eye of a gifted writer. His memoir of growing up in Des Moines, Iowa, in the 1950s, "The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid," is a bundle of laughs. "Happily we were indestructible. We won't see its like again, I'm afraid." Opening each chapter with a humorous item clipped from a newspaper or magazine of the fifties, he goes on to poke fun at the cultural icons of the time.
"No wonder people were happy."Like so many kids of the era, Bryson pictured himself in fantasy as a superhero, "The Thunderbolt Kid," so that he could pulverize people who bothered him by blasting them with his imaginary ray gun, reducing them to a pile of atomized dust.
I remember every thing that he wrote about and now I know that everyone's life in the 50/60's were as comedic as mine. This book took me right back to my childhood.
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