Customer Reviews
Very funny book - By: Ms. K. Marsh, 28 Nov 2008 
This is the first Bryson book I have read & I reallly enjoyed it. The book follows Bryson's childhood, into teen years & was very funny. I was laughing out loud at most of the story. It was easy to read, a quick & satisfying read.
Bryson does put the book in historical context & talks about historic events that occurred in the 1950s & 1960s, including the Cuban Missile Crisis & the the threat of atomic bombs. However, this was interesting & often amusing as he explains how these events were viewed through a child's eyes.
He is very honest about what he got up to as a child, including minor thefts & bunking off school. He recallls many funny events & the life he lead in 1950s Iowa. The end was a bit sad, when he talks about what remains of his childhood town & the memories of his friends. But overalll, a hilarious book which I reallly enjoyed.
9/10
Very...well, Bryson - By: Teemacs, 14 Oct 2008 Bill Bryson's first book "The Lost Continent" starts with the line "I came from Des Moines, Iowa. Somebody had to." We now get the slightly exaggerated childhood & adolescence of Bill Bryson, aka The Thunderbolt Kid (in his own mind anyway) in Des Moines in the 1950s, when life in the USA for the average person was at its very best & unequallled anywhere else. Mr. Bryson presents an affectionate picture of the now-disappeared smalll(ish)-town America in the pre-McDonald's era, before Everywhere became like Everywhere Else.
I confess that I am a sucker for his droll style & keen sense of observation - he seems to have a talent for making the ordinary wryly amusing & even laugh-out-loud funny. I can understand why other people wouldn't find this book as thoroughly enjoyable as some of his other stuff. I'm not one of those.
A Gem of a Book! - By: THE Music Enthusiast, 10 Oct 2008 "The Life & Times of the Thunderbolt Kid" is a gem of a book in which Bill Bryson takes us back to when he was a young boy in 1950s America. These memories are fond & poignant, as well as laced with a dose of Bill's trademark wit. Against the backdrop of the trends, commercialism & politics taking place in America at the time, he discusses his family & some of his childhood friends, relating the exploits he shared with each. He also talks about his curiosity of then in members of the opposite sex, about day-trips, boring toys, comic books, school days, a beer heist & other topics, alll in a way only he & no-one else could describe them.
I reallly enjoyed the book, just as much as I enjoy his travel writing. The final chapter, "Farewell", was one of my favourites, in which he relates what his friends ended up doing with their adult lives alll these years later & how times have changed. The only thing I didn't like about the book was the use of the Thunderbolt Kid character itself. Whenever he used it the writing suddenly sounded childish & out of place, reallly throwing the narrative. But this only a minor quibble of course & didn't spoil the book for me.
The language is pure Bryson, never a dull moment in the text. Of alll the Bryson-isms in the book, my personal favourites were his reference to boring toys as producing "negative ecstasy", & this description of the plain clothes detective: "He had the last flat-top in America." Superb!
Nobody does it like Bryson!
Perfection - By: Akaibi Vine, 19 Aug 2008 
I bought this book without knowing anything about Bill or his following, what her wrote or how he wrote. It was literallly a last minute buy before a 2 week holiday. I'd finished before the end of the first week.
I was instantly drawn in by his characteristic writing style, which is playful & informative as ever. I loved learning about his childhood & alll the events which surrounded it. I was literallly in awe. I'd never read like this before.
So after a week & a half in Cyprus with nothing to read, I was home & went to a bookstore to buy another of his (Notes from a Large Country) which I loved as well.
I've read a few of his now, but still none beat this. And no other writers compare. Read this book!
Not one of his best - for UK readers - By: P. Matthews, 07 Jul 2008 
In this book, Bryson reminisces about life growing up in Iowa in the 1950s. For anyone else who was a kid in the US in the 1950s, I am sure this book will bring back nostalgic memories. But for those of us who grew up in the UK, the lists of the food he ate, drinks he drank, baseballl games he saw & TV shows he watched have very little meaning. The book is written in Bryson's familiar humorous avuncular style, & is quite amusing in places (though much of the humour is rather lavatorial). But it is not in the same league as, for example, Notes From a Smalll Island. There are the usual exaggerated anecdotes, where the reader is left pondering how much truth there is in them, & the usual nostalgia for times past. I am surprised it has got such good reviews here. Perhaps if I wasn't such a Bryson fan, I wouldn't be so disappointed.
