About The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid

I'm pleased to announce that Bill Bryson's memoir The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid is the January selection for the Library's Featured Book of the Month program! Place your hold today!

School Library Journal writes: "The Thunderbolt Kid was born in the 1950s when six-year-old Bryson found a mysterious, scratchy green sweater with a satiny thunderbolt across the chest. The jersey bestowed magic powers on the wearer--X-ray vision and the power to zap teachers and babysitters and deflect unwanted kisses from old people. These are the memoirs of that Kid, whose earthly parents were not really half bad—a loving mother who didn’t cook and was pathologically forgetful, but shared her love of movies with her youngest child, and a dad who was the greatest baseball writer that ever lived and took his son to dugouts and into clubhouses where he met such famous players as Stan Musial and Willie Mays. Simpler times are conveyed with exaggerated humor; the author recalls the middle of the last century in the middle of the country (Des Moines, Iowa), when cigarettes were good for you, waxy candies were considered delicious, and kids were taught to read with Dick and Jane."

From The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid:

"I was captivated by the Dick and Jane family. They were so wonderfully, fascinatingly different from my own family. I particularly recall one illustration in which all the members of the Dick and Jane family, for entertainment, stand on one leg, hold the other out straight, and try to grab a toe on the extended foot without losing balance and falling over. They are having the most delightful time doing this. I stared and stared at that picture and realized that there were no circumstances, including at gunpoint, in which you could get all the members of my family to try to do that together."

About Bill Bryson

The first thing that comes to mind when I think of Bill Bryson is how much he makes me laugh. I’ll be reading a passage in one of his books and start laughing so uncontrollably that my stomach hurts. Once this happened sitting next to my friend on a plane to New York City while reading A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail. The second time was sitting on the couch next to my husband reading our January Featured Book of the Month, The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid. My friend’s reaction (as well as my husband’s) was that I was pretty weird. But if you haven’t read Bill Bryson before, you just don’t understand.

According to the author's website, Bill Bryson was born in Des Moines, Iowa, in 1951. (Or as he humorously writes in his first travel book, The Lost Continent: Travels in Small-Town America: “I come from Des Moines. Somebody had to"). A backpacking expedition in 1973 brought him to England where he met his wife and decided to live. He wrote for the English newspapers The Times and The Independent for many years, and supplemented his income by writing travel articles. He lived with his family in North Yorkshire before moving to Hanover, New Hampshire, in 1995 with his wife and four children before returning again to England in 2003, where they currently reside.

Although he is best known for his travel writing (A Walk in the Woods, I’m a Stranger Here Myself, In a Sunburned Country, etc.), he has also written engaging books about his other interests: the English language (Bryson’s Dictionary of Troublesome Words, The Mother Tongue, Made in America, Shakespeare: The World as Stage) and science (A Short History of Nearly Everything).

Be sure to listen to his hilarious 2006 NPR interview about his childhood and The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid, or read my very own Turning the Page blog about A Walk in the Woods.

Coming Soon - Discussion Questions

I hope you enjoy The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid. I'll be posting some discussion questions soon, so stay tuned!