- Bryson, Bill.
The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid.
London: Black Swan, 2007.
ISBN 978-0-552-77254-9.
-
What could be better than growing up in the United States in the
1950s? Well, perhaps being a kid with super powers
as the American dream reached its apogee and before the madness
started! In this book, humorist, travel writer, and
science populariser extraordinaire Bill Bryson
provides a memoir of his childhood (and, to a lesser extent,
coming of age) in Des Moines, Iowa in the 1950s and '60s. It is
a thoroughly engaging and charming narrative which, if you
were a kid there, then will bring back a flood of fond memories
(as well as some acutely painful ones) and if you weren't, to
appreciate, as the author closes the book, “What a wonderful
world it was. We won't see its like again, I'm afraid.”
The 1950s were the golden age of comic books, and whilst shopping
at the local supermarket, Bryson's mother would drop him in the
(unsupervised) Kiddie Corral where he and other offspring could
indulge for free to their heart's content. It's only natural
a red-blooded Iowan boy would discover himself to be a
superhero, The Thunderbolt Kid, endowed with ThunderVision, which
enabled his withering gaze to vapourise morons. Regrettably,
the power seemed to lack permanence, and the morons so dispersed
into particles of the luminiferous æther had a tedious way of
reassembling themselves and further vexing our hero and his
long-suffering schoolmates. But still, more work for
The Thunderbolt Kid!
This was a magic time in the United States—when prosperity not
only returned after depression and war, but exploded to such an extent
that mean family income more than doubled in the 1950s while most
women still remained at home raising their families. What had
been considered luxuries just a few years before: refrigerators
and freezers, cars and even second cars, single family homes, air conditioning,
television, all became commonplace (although kids would still gather
in the yard of the neighbourhood plutocrat to squint through his
window at the wonder of colour TV and chuckle at why he paid so
much for it).
Although the transformation of the U.S. from an agrarian society
to a predominantly urban and industrial nation was well underway,
most families were no more than one generation removed from the
land, and Bryson recounts his visits to his grandparents' farm
which recall what was lost and gained as that pillar of American
society went into eclipse.
There are relatively few factual errors, but from time to time Bryson's
narrative swallows counterfactual left-wing conventional
wisdom about the Fifties. For example, writing about
atomic bomb testing:
Altogether between 1946 and 1962, the United States detonated
just over a thousand nuclear warheads, including some three
hundred in the open air, hurling numberless tons of radioactive
dust into the atmosphere. The USSR, China, Britain, and France
detonated scores more.
Sigh…where do we start? Well, the obvious subtext
is that U.S. started the arms race and that other nuclear powers
responded in a feeble manner. In fact, the U.S. conducted a total
of 1030 nuclear tests, with a total of 215 detonated in the atmosphere,
including all tests up until testing was suspended in 1992, with the
balance conducted underground with no release of radioactivity. The
Soviet Union (USSR) did, indeed, conduct “scores” of tests,
to be precise 35.75 score with a total of 715 tests, with 219 in the
atmosphere—more than the U.S.—including
Tsar Bomba,
with a yield of 50 megatons. “Scores” indeed—surely
the arms race was entirely at the instigation of the U.S.
If you've grown up in he U.S. in the 1950s or wished you did, you'll
want to read this book. I had totally forgotten the radioactive
toilets you had to pay to use but kids could wiggle under the door
to bask in their actinic glare, the glories of automobiles you could
understand piece by piece and were your ticket to exploring a
broad continent where every town, every city was completely
different: not just another configuration of the same franchises
and strip malls (and yet recall how exciting it was when they
first arrived: “We're finally part of the great national
adventure!”)
The 1950s, when privation gave way to prosperity, yet Leviathan had
not yet supplanted family, community, and civil society, it was
utopia to be a kid (although, having been there, then, I'd have deemed
it boring, but if I'd been confined inside as present-day embryonic
taxpayers in safetyland are I'd have probably blown things up. Oh
wait—Willoughby already did that, twelve hours too early!).
If you grew up in the '50s, enjoy spending a few pleasant hours back
there; if you're a parent of the baby boomers, exult in the childhood
and opportunities you entrusted to them. And if you're a parent of
a child in this constrained century? Seek to give your child the
unbounded opportunities and unsupervised freedom to explore the world
which Bryson and this humble scribbler experienced as we grew up.
Vapourising morons with ThunderVision—we need you more than
ever, Thunderbolt Kid!
A U.S. edition is available.
January 2010 