Let's Trade Childhoods

books:


	• The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid: A Memoir Random House Audio, 2006 average customer review:based on 9 reviews view larger image
	for more information click here

highly recommended

Great Fun

This was a wonderful book, which also deviates here and there into politics and general history.

I really came to enjoy Bryson's observations about how "the good old days" were also fraught with some significant downsides, which we've gratefully grown beyond.

One carp: Bryson himself reads the audio edition, and he's not the most gifted reader I've ever heard. He's so laconic that the material really has to carry itself.

H'mmm - maybe that's not such a bad thing after all...anyway, you'll enjoy this book in any form.

PS - if you like this, you'll love the writings of Jean Shepard, too.

for more information click here

Bathroom Humor

I am a big fan of Bill Bryson but was a little disappointed with the Thunderbolt Kid. Some of the eating habits were outright gross. Many of the stunts and shenanigans were not what I'd expect out of Bryson. Much of his wit was missing in this book. I had few if any laugh out loud moments through this book.

for more information click here

Bryson Scores Again!

Bill Bryson's story of growing up in Iowa is a terrific book. I bought it in large print for my mother, who can read only large print, and who has difficulty hearing too, so this is the only way she could enjoy the book. She too adores Bill Bryson. We love his facility with language, and his many ways of making us laugh. He's a marvelous storyteller.

for more information click here

A lost world revisited

As always, Bryson is informative (the Thunderbolt Kid is really an excellent history of the 1950s and '60s in the U.S.) and wonderfully amusing (as in laugh out loud).

He's also an excellent narrator of this audio book.

Just one caveat. While the book is funny and interesting throughout, from my vantage point, at least, little about Bryson as a teenager was appealing: he essentially opted out of high school life, chose to spend minimal time with his family, was a petty thief, and starting at age 14 smoked like a chimney and drank a lot of alcohol. If you can't tolerate hearing about a kid like that, don't get this book.

for more information click here

Let's Trade Childhoods

Bill Bryson is by far the funniest, most insightful, travel writer today.
Here his travels are temporal, instead of spacial as he takes us back to his childhood - and what a childhood it was. His writing is so personal and open that you can't help but feel that this book was written specifically for you.

It is both a very middle class North American tale, set in the fifties and a Calvin archetype (as in Calvin and Hobbes) visioneering a rich and adventurous landscape, that none of the adults could see.

May The Thunderbolt Kid ride again.

David Cale

for more information click here

reviews: page 1, 2

BONUS FEATURE: Exclusive interview with the author.

From one of the most beloved and bestselling authors in the English language, a vivid, nostalgic and utterly hilarious memoir of growing up in the middle of the United States in the middle of the last century. A book that delivers on the promise that it is ?laugh-out-loud funny.?

Some say that the first hints that Bill Bryson was not of Planet Earth came from his discovery, at the age of six, of a woollen jersey of rare fineness. Across the moth-holed chest was a golden thunderbolt. It may have looked like an old college football sweater, but young Bryson knew better. It was obviously the Sacred Jersey of Zap, and proved that he had been placed with this innocuous family in the middle of America to fly, become invisible, shoot guns out of people?s hands from a distance, and wear his underpants over his jeans in the manner of Superman.

Bill Bryson?s first travel book opened with the immortal line, ?I come from Des Moines. Somebody had to.? In this hilarious new memoir, he travels back to explore the kid he once was and the weird and wonderful world of 1950s America. He modestly claims that this is a book about not very much: about being small and getting much larger slowly. But for the rest of us, it is a laugh-out-loud book that will speak volumes ? especially to anyone who has ever been young.

for more information click here

hot