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Jump to navigationJump to searchThe Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid by Bill Bryson (view source)
Revision as of 12:58, 14 May 2018
, 12:58, 14 May 2018no edit summary
It helped that he grew up Iowa. A landlocked agrarian island, its friendly folk belonged to a bygone age even then. In ''The Thunderbolt Kid'', Bryson describes it all with a wistful affection. His - and America's - innocence were to be short-lived. But in the meantime, there were comic books to read, giant fridges to buy and TV shows to watch.
Bryson does well to extract 400 mainly entertaining pages from a happy, uneventful, affluent childhood. Mercifully, his parents - both journalists - were endowed with numerous mild eccentricities. And Bryson's taste for smut is as undiminished here as in his peerless first two books, [[''The Lost Continent: Travels in Small Town America]]'', and [[''Neither Here Nor There: Travels in Europe]]''.
There are hilarious tales involving the glass jars that his mother kept under the sink for last-minute expulsions of 'toity' (the family euphemism for urine). His father's penchant for assembling midnight snacks while wearing nothing but a t-shirt also gives rise to deliciously embarrassing moments.
