Dispatches from the memory of Books

Ever since Bill Bryson wrote the words "I came from Des Moines. Somebody had to." in his first travel book (The Lost Continent), his loyal readers had been waiting for him to expound on that. And now he has satisfied them, with a whole book devoted to Des Moines, Iowa...Albeit the Des Moines of Bryson's youth, in the 1950's.
The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid (published here in Aus before the US/Canada, so there!), is part memoir and part nostalgia, but also gives insight into the cultural era that gave us the baby boomers. The book is funny, sad, poignant and bitter all at the same time. While Bill entertains the reader with his outrageous tales about a kid's life in America in the fifties, he also laments for the passing of that seemingly gentler (more naive?) time. His tale about the atomic-powered self-cleaning toilet seats in a small Des Moines diner is flabbergasting, but he also goes on to write about the many, unsafe nuclear bomb tests that were conducted around the American Midwest during that time, and how people were kept in the dark about the consequences.
In between stories about his dad's baseball reporting for the local paper, and his desperate search for a way into his first strip show, he laments the loss of the locally owned and operated department stores, restaurants and movie houses, overtaken by the McD's and the Walmarts of today. Oh yes, and we finally get to hear the backstory about his old friend Katz, who also starred in "A walk in the woods" (although Hannelie still maintains that he's wholly fictitious). A very funny look at American culture.

Posted by HannesB at 7:47 PM Comments