“Nine months later the Soviets surprised the Western powers by exploding a thermonuclear device of their own. The race to obliterate life was on — and how. Now we truly were become Death, the shatterer of worlds. So it is perhaps not surprising that as this happened I sat in Des Moines, Iowa, quietly shitting myself. I had little choice. I was ten months old.” –Bill Bryson
And so goes Bill Bryson’s unrivaled knack for delivering hard facts with an uncompromising wit and a flair for the greatly exaggerated in his new book The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid. In what is part childhood memoir, part history of 1950s America, Bryson’s hilarious aptitude for sprinkling historic data with delightful embellishments results in a larger-than-life nostalgic journey through an America that is at once frightening and enchanting, foreign and familiar, and is no more.
The Thunderbolt Kid is the superhero alter-ego of the childhood Bryson, who grew up in Des Moines, IA. Bryson navigates Kid World set against the featureless landscape of the Midwest with tales of a home life led by a father partial to being naked from the waist down, of misguided family vacations that ended him up in Harlem, and high school beer heists of epic proportions.
Most impressive is his attention to detail of American life in a bygone era: space exploration, proliferation of the automobile, the day Playboy began showing pubic hair, UFOs, the arrival of television in America’s homes, the meatloaf-based cuisine of Midwestern church socials, Growing up with Dick and Jane books, Maidenform bras, Slinkys, The Bay of Pigs, grape-flavored Nehi soda, George & Gracie. With great enthusiasm, he fondly recalls a time when a new kitchen appliance was the object of a large neighborhood audience for weeks after its purchase.
In all of his memoirs, Bryson is a master manipulator of wistfulness and shrewd realism. The American life he remembers in The Thunderbolt Kid was simpler, and the universe was a less explored place than today. Therefore, people had bigger imaginations, as virtually anything was possible: life on Mars, surviving a nuclear attack in a catalog-ordered air-raid shelter with non-perishable food, self-driving cars, anything! But concurrently, he expertly weaves in the less comforting aspects of the era: racial brutality, the nuclear arms race, polio, McCarthyism, the banana republics of the United Fruits Company.
No sooner has Bryson convinced you that cartoons, along with most things, were better in the 1950s, than he reminds you of Walt Disney’s unsupported testimony that the cartoonist’s guild was full of Communists. Striking a balance between hard social truths, warmhearted memories and fantastic imagination, he evokes a world where happiness was easier, often taking the form of something as simple as an electronic ice crusher, but assures us that some things — like spray-on mayonnaise — are better left in the past.
–Julia Clarke
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