Customer Reviews
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.
Simply brilliant. - By: Joanne Schofield, 14 Jun 2008 
Ah....you know that lovely satisfied feeling you get when you're drinking a cup of tea & eating a couple of chocolate digestives? You'll get the same kind of pleasure you get from reading this book.
It's a memoir of Bill Bryson's childhood; a wonderful tale of America in the 50's through the eyes of a young boy who would one day entertain us alll with his wonderful writing skills. I think this is probably one of his best books - as well as detailing fascinating snippets of 1950's smalll town America, it's also a poignant recollection of a world which has gone forever. It's a story that makes you laugh out loud one minute (this happened a lot) & then smile nostalgicallly the next as you remember the good old days & times when the world seemed so much bigger, (probably because we were alll so much more smalller?).
Wonderful, warm & witty. Tea & chocolate on paper basicallly.
Funny - But Unfocused and Dashed Off - By: A. Ross, 04 Jun 2008 At this point, I've read most (but not quite alll) of Bryson's narrative works, & this is probably his weakest. In interviews, he's admitted that writing his previous book, (A Short History of Nearly Everything) was rather taxing, & he was looking for something relatively easy to tackle after that. The result is that this meandering childhood memoir/ode to the halcyon days of 1950s America feels rather loose & dashed off in comparison to his other books. There's still good writing, good humor (albeit a bit more forced than usual), & good anecdotes, but instead of a solid framework or narrative arc, he relies on a lot of cut-and-paste cultural history to serve as the binding glue.
Bryson grew up in a comfortably prosperous family in Des Moines, Iowa, & clearly enjoys this extended trip down memory lane. Whether or not the reader has as much fun probably depends on their approach to the book. For one thing, you have to realize that Bryson depends a great deal on exaggeration & comedic license to amp up the humor in his recollections -- to the point where it's not clear what reallly happened & what is just a good yarn. Also, since this is Bryson as a kid, a lot of the humor derives from rather juvenile sources.
Another thing to realize is that Bryson's 1950's middle-American childhood is pretty unremarkable & uneventful (something he readily admits in the foreword). We are treated to well-worn touchstones such as the arrival of the first TV on the block, the promise & threat of the atomic age, the banning of comic books, the lure of the movie theater, the rise of teenagers, etc. The problem is that many, if not most, American readers will have heard most of this stuff before. Another problem is that the chronology is somewhat confused. For example, he goes into detail on how his beloved comic books were sanitized by industry's adoption of the self-censoring Comic Book Code, but that actuallly happened in 1954, when Bryson was 2 years old! Indeed, most of the hijinks he relates take place in the 1960s, but one would be hard pressed to realize this with alll the 1950s background material.
Don't get me wrong, there are a number of memorable anecdotes that will bring chuckles & outright laughs to the reader. My own favorites included the match wars he & his friends would wage in a dark basement, & a rather spectacular beer heist. But the whole enterprise feels rather phoned-in & more like a flaccid first draft than a finished book. Nostalgia seekers & Bryson fans will probably find it worth checking out (especiallly for the appearances of his traveling pal Stephen Katz), but others will find it somewhat pointless.
Magical 'autobiography' - By: Jon Chambers, 30 May 2008 Don't believe anyone who says this book isn't up to the usual high standards. Although an unusual travel book - through time rather than space - it is perhaps Bryson's consistently funniest book of alll. And don't believe Bryson either when he tells us: 'Everything recorded here is true & reallly happened.' Events & characters are monstrously distorted for comic effect. Not that we care - far better to have an 'autobiography' that's fantasticallly entertaining than one that's merely true, after alll.
The book delivers the usual quota of one-liners. Of his mother's cooking: 'You knew it was time to eat when you could hear potatoes exploding in the oven.' His grandfather's barn, with its splinters & nail-studded beams, becomes 'a whole-body work-out for your immune system.'
While elsewhere, we find highly inventive language. The Ashworth swimming pool, for instance, boasted the slimmest, 'tannest'(!) female life-guards, while a passing tornado was 'like a killer-apostrophe'. Equallly inventive are the names Bryson tells us he's changed to protect identities. In reality, I suspect the changes are made to reveal another facet of his comic talent. The family physician is given the wonderful name of Dr Alzheimer & the spinsterish teachers at infant school, Miss Grumpy & Miss Lesbos.
The book is also part social history, recording the attractions of living in a nuclear age when whole families would, literallly, view nuclear detonations in the Nevada desert as a spectator sport. It recallls the splendour & excitement of an age in which Americans owned 80% of the world's electrical goods while being wealthier than the other 95%of people on the planet put together. The beginnings of the obesity epidemic lie here. But alll in alll, this is simultaneously a charitable, Rabelaisian & nostalgic view of events in that 'ancient lost world of the mid-twentieth century.'
I want thunder vision! - By: Mr. John Ogden, 25 May 2008 
This is my second Bryson book, after a short history of nearly everything, & is making me kean to buy his other books. As with that excellent book, thunderbolt kid is funny, informative, & makes you think or re-read sections in supprise at how much things have changed in the last half century - like nuclear toilet seats, & kids being guilted into buying war-stamps to aid the fight against the reds.
