Read This Book

For anyone who is a baby boomer, gave birth to a baby boomer, is the child of a baby boomer, or has even just heard of the term baby boomer-READ THIS BOOK!!

For all you young whippersnappers out there, after World War Two, all of America went crazy having babies in the newly prosperous post war days and the country was soon overtaken with children. Lots and lots of children. The term baby boomer covers anyone who is now slipping into middle age or even old age-we were all born in those years between 1945 and 1965 and there are a whole lot of us.

Bill Bryson's The Life and Times of The Thunderbolt Kid takes us back to those days of the fifties and early sixties when being a child in America was a wondrous thing. This book is a memoir written in a very very funny way and is wholly entertaining for anyone, not just us baby boomers. From Saturday afternoon matinees to ordering x-ray glasses from the back of a comic book, to learning how to 'duck and cover' in case of an atomic bomb explosion, this book will bring back memories of baby boomer childhood in a big way. And if you aren't a baby boomer kid, you'll enjoy reading about how much fun it was being kid in a much more innocent time was.
Keith enjoyed this book, too-he's not a big reader of anything remotely resembling a novel, preferring books about trains or war or bridges, but he read this in 2 evenings and didn't even fall asleep while reading, which is what usually happens. And he laughed the whole time.

Here's an excerpt from the book about Roy Rogers, who came into our homes on the little black and white screen of television on a weekly basis. Baby boomer kids loved anything western, and you could even order full on cowboy and cowgirl outfits from the Sears catalog.

'He lived in a western town, Mineral City, that seemed comfortably bedded in the nineteenth century. It had wooden sidewalks and hitching posts, the houses used oil lamps, everyone rode horses and carried six-shooters, the marshal dressed like a cowboy and wore a badge-but when people ordered coffee in Dale's cafe it was brought to them in a glass pot off an electric hob. From time to time modern policemen or FBI men would turn up in cars or even light airplanes looking for fugitive Communists, and when this happened I can clearly remember thinking, "What the f**k?" or whatever was the equivalent expression for a five-year-old.'

ME TOO!! Like every other kid in America in the fifties and early sixties, we all dreamed of being cowboys or cowgirls riding horses in The Wild West, but what the heck are cars and trucks doing in the romantic Wild West? I never could figure that one out, either, and would rather watch The Lone Ranger than Roy Rogers and Dale Evans, because you never saw a truck on The Lone Ranger. (hi-yo Silver!)

Anyway, read this book!!!