The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid by Bill Bryson: audio book review

This is my last entry for my Official Audio Book Review Week--looks like I'll only have four entries instead of five.  But, oh, what a book it was!  If you have ever read my blog before, you might know about my love for Bill Bryson.  I've read more of his books than any other author's, and I've even read every word of his reference books.  This is all the more unusual since Bryson is a nonfiction writer and I'm an unapologetic reader of novels and not much else.  I've even had the pleasure of meeting the man not once, but twice, and they were two of the best days of my adult life. The fact that he would still have very little, if any, awareness of my existence is not a justifiable reason for suicide, or so I keep telling myself.  Every day.

Anyway, I read The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid back when it was first published, and my husband reminded me that we had listened to the audio of this book together during a trip to Hawaii (we did a lot of driving on the Big Island), which I had all but forgotten. So finishing up this audio book in my car last night was more like revisiting an old friend on two levels--both the content and the performance. Bryson is an excellent reader of his own books and I estimate that I've listened to his voice for upwards of 100 hours.

This book is a memoir of his childhood growing up in Des Moines, Iowa. He was the youngest of three children, born to a mother and father who both worked for the Des Moines Register (the local newspaper) at a time when not many women worked outside of the home, or at least not many wives and mothers. He grew up in a time of wonder (childhood in general) but also a time of national fear (the cold war, the Bay of Pigs, etc) and this juxtaposition makes for a pretty entertaining read.

Based on what I've read in his other books, I feel as if I generally have a good idea of Bryson's politics and social values, which is why some of the content in this memoir was all the more surprising. I don't actually believe that Bryson is a man who objectifies women or is homophobic (he does, alas, appear to be rather anti-Southern in most of his books), but those things were both present in his memoir.  That is, he spends a good bit of time specifically recalling the urgency with which he tries to enter the stripper tent year after year at the Iowa State Fair and trying to see naked women in general. Though Bryson becomes fast friends with a gay boy in his teens, there are the casual references to the negative social repercussions for kids who acted/looked/dressed gay, and the use of "gay" as a pejorative.

After a bit of reflection, I think Bryson was more likely trying to show an accurate reflection of growing up in middle America in the 1950s and 1960s, rather than trying to reflect his current views on anything in particular.

The downside, of course, of listening to a very funny audio book is that it's nearly impossible to excerpt   my favorite parts in a review.  Clearly it would take far more effort than I'm willing to expend to go find my copy of the actual book, flip through it, and decide which parts to quote here. So, suffice it to say that listening to Bryson is a singularly excellent experience.  If you've never read him before, I wouldn't necessarily recommend starting with Thunderbolt Kid--try A Walk in the Woods or In A Sunburned Country instead and prepare to be entertained and enlightened at once.