The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid: A Memoir
Bill Bryson
Language: English
Pages: 270
ISBN: 0767919378
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
From one of the world's most beloved writers and New York Times bestselling author of One Summer, a vivid, nostalgic, and utterly hilarious memoir of growing up in the 1950s
Bill Bryson was born in the middle of the American century—1951—in the middle of the United States—Des Moines, Iowa—in the middle of the largest generation in American history—the baby boomers. As one of the best and funniest writers alive, he is perfectly positioned to mine his memories of a totally all-American childhood for 24-carat memoir gold. Like millions of his generational peers, Bill Bryson grew up with a rich fantasy life as a superhero. In his case, he ran around his house and neighborhood with an old football jersey with a thunderbolt on it and a towel about his neck that served as his cape, leaping tall buildings in a single bound and vanquishing awful evildoers (and morons)—in his head—as "The Thunderbolt Kid."
Using this persona as a springboard, Bill Bryson re-creates the life of his family and his native city in the 1950s in all its transcendent normality—a life at once completely familiar to us all and as far away and unreachable as another galaxy. It was, he reminds us, a happy time, when automobiles and televisions and appliances (not to mention nuclear weapons) grew larger and more numerous with each passing year, and DDT, cigarettes, and the fallout from atmospheric testing were considered harmless or even good for you. He brings us into the life of his loving but eccentric family, including affectionate portraits of his father, a gifted sportswriter for the local paper and dedicated practitioner of isometric exercises, and OF his mother, whose job as the home furnishing editor for the same paper left her little time for practicing the domestic arts at home. The many readers of Bill Bryson’s earlier classic, A Walk in the Woods, will greet the reappearance in these pages of the immortal Stephen Katz, seen hijacking literally boxcar loads of beer. He is joined in the Bryson gallery of immortal characters by the demonically clever Willoughby brothers, who apply their scientific skills and can-do attitude to gleefully destructive ends.
Warm and laugh-out-loud funny, and full of his inimitable, pitch-perfect observations, The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid is as wondrous a book as Bill Bryson has ever written. It will enchant anyone who has ever been young.
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When Greenwood, my elementary school, dispatched its happy hordes into the snowy streets to begin three glorious weeks of yuletide relaxation (and school holidays in those days, let me say, were of a proper and generous duration), the family Rambler was waiting out front, steaming extravagantly, keenly even, and ready to cut a trail across the snowy prairies. We headed west, as usual, crossed the mighty Missouri River at Council Bluffs and made our way past Omaha. Then we just kept on going. We.
In Pasadena, California, student Edward Mulrooney was arrested after he tossed a bomb at his psychology teacher's house and left a note that said: If you don't want your home bombed or your windows shot out, then grade fairly and put your assignments on the board or is this asking too much? Time magazine, April 16, 1956 GREENWOOD, MY ELEMENTARY SCHOOL, was a wonderful old building, enormous to a small child, like a castle made of brick. Built in 1901, it stood off Grand Avenue at the far end of.
Country and they would all laugh that peculiar braying laugh that exists only when children are invited by adults to enjoy themselves at the expense of another child. It is the cruelest laugh in the world. DESPITE THESE SELF-INFLICTED HARDSHIPS, I quite enjoyed school, especially reading. We were taught to read from Dick and Jane books, solid hardbacks bound in a heavy-duty red or blue fabric. They had short sentences in large type and lots of handsome watercolor illustrations featuring a happy,.
Meaningfully speak. He asked, I believe, why I didn't go upstairs to the bathroom like a normal person. It was a fair question in the circumstances. Well, sometimes we're in a hurry, my mother went on, a touch uncomfortably. So I keep a jar under the sink a special jar. I reappeared from the fridge, cradling more jars as many as I could carry. I'm pretty sure I've used all these, too, I announced. That can't be right, my mother said, but there was a kind of question mark hanging off the edge.
Celebrate the last day of the school year, Willoughby and his brother decided to make a bomb that they would pack in confetti and bury the night before in the center of the Callanan lawn, a handsome sward of never-walked-upon grass enclosed by a formal semi-circular driveway. At 3:01 p.m., just as a thousand chattering students were pouring from the school's four exits, the bomb, activated by an alarm-clock timer, would go off with an enormous bang that would fill the air with dirt and drifting.