I don't do book reports. I hated them in school, loathed them in college, and so I don't do reviews either. Nor do I belong to book clubs, literary societies or any of their ilk. I think a bunch of people gathering to discuss the ins and outs, whys, wherefores and meaning of a book is just too bloody precious for words. If you've got a real expert (like a professor) leading the discussion, it has some redeeming educational -- if not social -- merit, but civilians? Give me a break! So don't think this is a book review or a book report. It isn't. What it is, is an appreciation of a recent book by Bill Bryson, (author of A Walk In The Woods and I'm A Stranger Here, Myself, among others), one of my absolute all-time favorite writers. I like his books, too. Mr. Bryson has presented us with a memoir. I don't recall having seen it touted on Oprah, so I have no reason to doubt its veracity. Besides, the childhood Bryson recalls is far too like the one I remember for it to be very imaginary. Our childhood memories are, to a degree, always imaginary, filtered as they are through all the years of adulthood, so perhaps I should say that
The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid is, rather than literally accurate, most likely a well-remembered set of circumstances, jazzed up and amplified for our entertainment. Bryson has made a career of going places, doing things, and writing about them. He does it so well that, having decided to take us along while revisiting his childhood in Iowa, it is no surprise that his remembrances are literate, funny -- not to say hilarious (see the description of "duck and cover" drills at the bottom of p. 149, for example) -- and almost painfully nostalgic for those of us who shared the same time, if not place. ...Nehi was the pop of small towns--I don't know why--and it had the intensest flavor and most vivid colors of any products yet cleared by the Food and Drug Administration for human consumption. It came in six select flavors--grape, strawberry, orange, cherry, lime-lemon (never "lemon-lime") and root beer--but each was so potently flavorful that it made your eyes water like an untended sprinkler, and so sharply carbonated that it was like swallowing a thousand tiny razor blades. It was wonderful. The Nehi at Benteco's was kept in a large, blue, very chilly cooler, like a chest freezer, in which the bottles hung by their necks in rows. To get to a particular bottle usually required a great deal of complicated maneuvering, transferring bottles out of one row and into another in order to get to the last bottle of grape, say. (Grape was the one flavor that could actually make you hallucinate; I once saw to the edge of the universe while drinking grape Nehi.) The process was great fun if it was you that was doing the selecting (especially on a hot day when you could bask in the cooler's chilled, moist air) and a torment if you had to wait on some other kid. Did I lie? Buy it, get it from the library, steal it -- but read it!
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