About the Author

Bill Bryson is one of the funniest writers alive. For the past two decades he has been entertaining readers with bravura displays of wit and wisdom. His first book, The Lost Continent, in which he put small town America under the microscope, was an instant classic of modern travel literature. Although he has returned to America many times since, never has he been more funny, more memorable, more acute than in his most recent book, The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid, in which he revisits that most fecund of topics, his childhood. The trials and tribulations of growing up in 1950s America are all here. Des Moines, Iowa, is recreated as a backdrop to a golden age where everything was good for you, including DDT, cigarettes and nuclear fallout. This is as much a story about an almost forgotten, innocent America as it is about Bryson’s childhood. The past is a foreign country. They did things differently then ...