The Life And Times Of The Thunderbolt Kid

A wittily incisive book about innocence, and its limits, but in no sense an innocent book...Like Alan Bennett, another ironist posing as a sentimentalist, Bryson can play the teddy-bear and then deliver a sudden, grizzly-style swipe...might tell us as much about the oddities of the American way as a dozen think-tanks.

Boyd Tonkin, Independent

Always witty and sometimes hilarious...wonderfully funny and touching.

Literary Review

A funny, effortlessly readable, quietly enchanted memoir...Bryson also provides a quirky social history of America...he always manages to slam on the brakes with a good joke just when things might get sentimental.

Daily Mail

Takes us on yet another amiable ramble through terrain viewed with his characteristic mixture of bemused wit, acerbic astonishment and sweet benevolence...we come closest to the real Bryson in this, his first true memoir...encompasses so much of human experience that you want to smile and sob at once...Bryson's evocation of an era is near perfect: tender, hilarious and true.

The Times

He can capture the flavour of the past with the lightest of touches...marvellous set pieces...As a chronicler of the foibles and absurdities of daily life, Bryson has few peers.

Sunday Telegraph

Is this the most cheerful book I've ever read, or the saddest?...hilarious...a lovely, happy book.

Evening Standard

Bryson [writes] with a whiff of irony and a stronger perfume of affection, but never the stink of sentimentality. Darting between his life and the trajectory of America, he slips in a few key contextualising details, which he deploys with the same deft ease that made his A Short History of Nearly Everything so sneakily edifying...very few [memoirs] contain a well of happiness this deep, or this complexly rendered.

Scotland on Sunday

The beautifully realised elegiac tone of his childhood memoir invites readers to go tumbling down the rabbit hole of memory into the best days of their lives...by turns playful affectionate, gently mocking, laugh-out-loud funny and even wistfully sad. His greatest gift is as a humorist, however, so it is the snickers, the guffaws and the undignified belly laughs he delivers on almost every page that make it worth buying...probably the funniest book you'll read this year. No, dammit. It is the funniest book you'll find anytime soon.

Sydney Morning Herald

Makes you wish that you could emigrate, become a child, get a flat-top haircut and some longlaced baseball boots, and sneak in and take up residence unnoticed with little Billy Bryson in his parents' household...he doesn't so much tell jokes as let his sentences stretch out and relax into feet-up, contented good humour...you can laugh along with Bryson, rather than at him.

Guardian

Happy childhood memoirs are every bit as fascinating to read as anguished ones if they are well written, and Bryson's prose flows like maple syrup...has an exquisite comic turn of phrase.

Spectator

Bryson at his best: deftly handling laugh-out-loud exaggeration of language and incident; telling rollicking good stories laced with a savagery that his nice-guy voice makes both funny and affectionate.

Observer

Outlandishly and improbably entertaining...inevitably [I] would be reduced to body-racking, tear-inducing, de-couching laughter.

New York Times