Bill Bryson is a master storyteller. This time he is telling the tale of his youth, growing up in Iowa in the 50's. He manages to be laugh-out-loud funny, poignant, and brutally honest all at the same time. Even if you didn't grow up in the 50's, Bryson will make you feel as if you did. The Thunderbolt Kid is of course Bryson himself, referring to his boyhood superpowers, which in his mind allowed him to instantly vaporize those who annoyed him. And a very hand power it was to have, too. These moments of childish imagination immediately take you back to the days when superheroes could save the day and the bad guys always got it in the end, and a little childhood innocence lasted beyond third grade.
Bryson gives a child's perspective to the cold war days including duck and cover drills, the Bomb, and looming communism. While parents and teachers worried about the big stuff, Bill was more concerned about comic books, Saturday movie matinées, baseball, and of course finding out everything he could about sex (which was remarkably difficult). The memoir extends into Bryson's teen years and the pranks he and his friends got away with. Readers of Bryson's Walk in the Woods will appreciate getting to meet the young Stephen Katz, his partner in crime.
This book made me remember all the unsupervised time I had growing up in the 60's and I found myself amazed all over again that my friends and I survived. And just when I start to mourn the loss of that perfect childhood where kids could roam at will, regularly pull the wool over their parents' eyes, and still somehow turn into respectable adults--I begin to wonder if it isn't completely lost. Only maybe now we're the ones with wool over our eyes.
One slight word of warning--this is probably a PG-13 title. For all its sweetness, it is still the memoir of a boy growing up.
Check status at GPL.
No comments:
Post a Comment