As the first book to read over my summer vacation this year I chose Bill Bryson’s The Life and Times of The Thunderbolt Kid. It’s an autobiographical tale of growing up in the 50s in Des Moines, Iowa.

An autobiography covering only the part of somebody’s childhood may not sound like much fun, but if you know Bill Bryson, you’ll also know better. Bryson has a rather amazing capability of making even mundane things sound exciting and fun. Plus the book, in all fairness, isn’t just about Bill’s childhood – it’s a remarkably vivid description of life in general in the USA in 1950′s; an age where everything was good for you and everything was exciting and new.

In his familiar sharp, sarcastic and exaggerating style, Bill takes you on a fascinating journey to what it was like – adolescent fantasies abound (hence the Thunderbolt Kid-title), but serious issues like the threat of nuclear war, national obsessions like Communism and international events like the Cuban missile crisis and other things aren’t left out either. In addition to being laugh-out-loud funny, the book provides one with interesting insights into historical events and life half a century ago, a lot of which may seem ludicrous and even scary in retrospect today. Like the plans on using hydrogen bombs for this and that:

Representative James E. Van Zandt of Pennsylvania, a leading proponent of devastation, promised that soon we would have a device of at least a hundred megatons – the one that might consume all our breathable air. At the same time, Edward Teller, the semi-crazed Hungarian-born physicist who was one of the presiding geniuses behind the development of the H-bomb, was dreaming up exciting peacetime uses for nuclear devices. Teller and his acolytes at the Atomic Energy Commission envisioned using H-bombs to enable massive civil engineering projects on a scale never before conceived – to create open-pit mines where mountains had once stood, to alter the courses of rivers in our favor (ensuring that Danube, for instance, served only capitalist countries), to blow away irksome impediments to commerce and shipping like the Great Barrier Reef of Australia. Excitedly they reported that just twenty-six bombs placed in a chain across the Isthmus of Panama would excavate a bigger, better Panama Canal more or less at once and provide a lovely show into the bargain. They even suggested that nuclear devices could be used to alter the Earth’s weather by adjusting the amount of dust in the atmosphere, for ever banishing winters from the northern US and sending them permanently to the Soviet Union instead.
[...]
In short, the creators of the hydrogen wished to wrap the world in unpredictable levels of radiation, obliterate whole ecosystems, despoil the face of the planet, and provoke and antagonize our enemies at every opportunity – and these were their peacetime dreams.

The above excerpt may not be entirely characteristic of the book in terms of content, but you get the idea of the writing style. I for one loved the book; it even made me want to visit Des Moines, but it made me want to visit Des Moines of the 50′s. Unfortunately it seems most of what was great back then has since been destroyed.

Anyway, if you like Bill’s writing style, you’ll love The Thunderbolt Kid; if you don’t, you may want to look elsewhere. I would give this 4½ out of 5 and as such, I can highly recommend it.