Customer Reviews: Read 85 more reviews...
 Perfection August 19, 2008
Akaibi Vine (England)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
I bought this book without knowing anything about Bill or his following, what her wrote or how he wrote. It was literally a last minute buy before a 2 week holiday. I'd finished before the end of the first week.
I was instantly drawn in by his characteristic writing style, which is playful and informative as ever. I loved learning about his childhood and all the events which surrounded it. I was literally in awe. I'd never read like this before.
So after a week and a half in Cyprus with nothing to read, I was home and went to a bookstore to buy another of his (Notes from a Large Country) which I loved as well.
I've read a few of his now, but still none beat this. And no other writers compare. Read this book!
 Not one of his best - for UK readers July 7, 2008
P. Matthews (UK)
In this book, Bryson reminisces about life growing up in Iowa in the 1950s. For anyone else who was a kid in the US in the 1950s, I am sure this book will bring back nostalgic memories. But for those of us who grew up in the UK, the lists of the food he ate, drinks he drank, baseball games he saw and TV shows he watched have very little meaning. The book is written in Bryson's familiar humorous avuncular style, and is quite amusing in places (though much of the humour is rather lavatorial). But it is not in the same league as, for example, Notes From a Small Island. There are the usual exaggerated anecdotes, where the reader is left pondering how much truth there is in them, and the usual nostalgia for times past. I am surprised it has got such good reviews here. Perhaps if I wasn't such a Bryson fan, I wouldn't be so disappointed.
Simply brilliant. June 14, 2008
Joanne Schofield (Newcastle upon Tyne, UK)
Ah....you know that lovely satisfied feeling you get when you're drinking a cup of tea and eating a couple of chocolate digestives? You'll get the same kind of pleasure you get from reading this book.
It's a memoir of Bill Bryson's childhood; a wonderful tale of America in the 50's through the eyes of a young boy who would one day entertain us all with his wonderful writing skills. I think this is probably one of his best books - as well as detailing fascinating snippets of 1950's small town America, it's also a poignant recollection of a world which has gone forever. It's a story that makes you laugh out loud one minute (this happened a lot) and then smile nostalgically the next as you remember the good old days and times when the world seemed so much bigger, (probably because we were all so much more smaller?).
Wonderful, warm and witty. Tea and chocolate on paper basically.
Funny - But Unfocused and Dashed Off June 4, 2008
A. Ross (Washington, DC)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
At this point, I've read most (but not quite all) of Bryson's narrative works, and this is probably his weakest. In interviews, he's admitted that writing his previous book, (A Short History of Nearly Everything) was rather taxing, and he was looking for something relatively easy to tackle after that. The result is that this meandering childhood memoir/ode to the halcyon days of 1950s America feels rather loose and dashed off in comparison to his other books. There's still good writing, good humor (albeit a bit more forced than usual), and good anecdotes, but instead of a solid framework or narrative arc, he relies on a lot of cut-and-paste cultural history to serve as the binding glue.
Bryson grew up in a comfortably prosperous family in Des Moines, Iowa, and clearly enjoys this extended trip down memory lane. Whether or not the reader has as much fun probably depends on their approach to the book. For one thing, you have to realize that Bryson depends a great deal on exaggeration and comedic license to amp up the humor in his recollections -- to the point where it's not clear what really happened and what is just a good yarn. Also, since this is Bryson as a kid, a lot of the humor derives from rather juvenile sources.
Another thing to realize is that Bryson's 1950's middle-American childhood is pretty unremarkable and uneventful (something he readily admits in the foreword). We are treated to well-worn touchstones such as the arrival of the first TV on the block, the promise and threat of the atomic age, the banning of comic books, the lure of the movie theater, the rise of teenagers, etc. The problem is that many, if not most, American readers will have heard most of this stuff before. Another problem is that the chronology is somewhat confused. For example, he goes into detail on how his beloved comic books were sanitized by industry's adoption of the self-censoring Comic Book Code, but that actually happened in 1954, when Bryson was 2 years old! Indeed, most of the hijinks he relates take place in the 1960s, but one would be hard pressed to realize this with all the 1950s background material.
Don't get me wrong, there are a number of memorable anecdotes that will bring chuckles and outright laughs to the reader. My own favorites included the match wars he and his friends would wage in a dark basement, and a rather spectacular beer heist. But the whole enterprise feels rather phoned-in and more like a flaccid first draft than a finished book. Nostalgia seekers and Bryson fans will probably find it worth checking out (especially for the appearances of his traveling pal Stephen Katz), but others will find it somewhat pointless.
Magical 'autobiography' May 30, 2008
Jon Chambers (Birmingham, England)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Don't believe anyone who says this book isn't up to the usual high standards. Although an unusual travel book - through time rather than space - it is perhaps Bryson's consistently funniest book of all. And don't believe Bryson either when he tells us: 'Everything recorded here is true and really happened.' Events and characters are monstrously distorted for comic effect. Not that we care - far better to have an 'autobiography' that's fantastically entertaining than one that's merely true, after all.
The book delivers the usual quota of one-liners. Of his mother's cooking: 'You knew it was time to eat when you could hear potatoes exploding in the oven.' His grandfather's barn, with its splinters and nail-studded beams, becomes 'a whole-body work-out for your immune system.'
While elsewhere, we find highly inventive language. The Ashworth swimming pool, for instance, boasted the slimmest, 'tannest'(!) female life-guards, while a passing tornado was 'like a killer-apostrophe'. Equally inventive are the names Bryson tells us he's changed to protect identities. In reality, I suspect the changes are made to reveal another facet of his comic talent. The family physician is given the wonderful name of Dr Alzheimer and the spinsterish teachers at infant school, Miss Grumpy and Miss Lesbos.
The book is also part social history, recording the attractions of living in a nuclear age when whole families would, literally, view nuclear detonations in the Nevada desert as a spectator sport. It recalls the splendour and excitement of an age in which Americans owned 80% of the world's electrical goods while being wealthier than the other 95%of people on the planet put together. The beginnings of the obesity epidemic lie here. But all in all, this is simultaneously a charitable, Rabelaisian and nostalgic view of events in that 'ancient lost world of the mid-twentieth century.'
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