I hesitate to mention this book I've been reading recently. For a couple of weeks it has brought constant joy to my early baby boomer's heart.

I hesitate to mention the book because it doesn't officially exist yet. The publisher has it listed for a "tentative" on-sale date of October 17, 2006, and a "tentative" price.

I don't know why they're so darn tentative. It's Bill Bryson, after all, author of hits such as A Short History of Nearly Everything and Neither Here Nor There and many others. Publisher Broadway Books has been around for a century or more; they're not going anywhere.

It's cruel to recommend The Life & Times of the Thunderbolt Kid: A Memoir. The more I tell you, the more frustrated you'll become, because I only have this one copy, and I can't lend it to everyone, and we don't like to frustrate our listeners.

In this tentatively priced and tentatively published new book Bryson writes, "I can't imagine there has ever been a more gratifying time or place to be alive than America in the 1950s... By 1951, when I came sliding down the chute, almost 90 percent of American families had refrigerators, and nearly three quarters had washing machines, telephones, vacuum cleaners and gas or electric stoves -- things that most of the rest of the world could still only fantasize about.

"There was, too, a wonderful simplicity of desire. It was the last time that people would be thrilled to own a toaster or waffle iron. If you bought a major appliance you invited the neighbors around to have a look at it."

My brother and I are Bryson's age, give or take five years or so, and like Bryson in Des Moines, Iowa, we grew up in San Francisco in the kind of kid-friendly, happily futuristic, comic-book-rich era he's talking about.

I wonder if Bryson's new book will appeal to less baby-boomy persons. For adults born when Nixon or Reagan were presidents this book is history, perhaps cultural anthropology with a little archaeology thrown in.

Believe Bill: The 1950s were a very good time to be a kid. "I knew kids who were pushed out the back door at eight in the morning and not allowed back in until five unless they were on fire or actively bleeding -- and they were always looking for something to do. If you stood on any corner with a bike -- any corner anywhere -- over a hundred children, many of whom you had never seen before, would appear and ask you where you were going.

"Life in Kids' World, wherever you went, was unsupervised, unregulated and robustly -- at times insanely -- physical and yet it was a remarkably peaceful place.

"Once when I was about six," Bryson writes, "I saw a kid throw a rock at another kid, from quite a distance, and it bounced off the target's head (quite beautifully I have to say) and made him bleed. This was talked about for years. Kids in the next county knew about it."

Ah, memories. I have a bent nose and slightly crossed eyes as a result of a wonderful rock fight I once enjoyed on Twin Peaks. My best friend had the high ground. I never should have bent over to pick up more ammunition. As I stood up to hurl another piece of shale he got me with a stone on the side of my nose. I'll always remember the fine cracking noise in my head as the doctor readjusted my bent septum. Even that was fun, in a kind of awful way.

I'm enjoying guffaws of pleasant recognition reading the anecdotes in The Life & Times of the Thunderbolt Kid. If you have an appointment calendar, or perhaps a version of Microsoft Outlook that hasn't crashed for a while, mark down October 17.

You know you're too old to remember what I said in today's essay. Write it down.

Aired Sunday July 9, 2006 at 10:55 am and Wednesday July 12, 2006 at 1:00 pm

Orders/Information:

The Life & Times of the Thunderbolt Kid: A Memoir by Bill Bryson. Broadway Books hardcover $25. To be published October 17, 2006. Tentatively.

Three years ago I reviewed A Short History of Nearly Everything here: http://www.gallerybooks.com/bkm/wob030818.html

My review of I'm A Stranger Here Myself is here: http://www.gallerybooks.com/bkm/bkm990910.html