My father was born in 1948 in Edmonton (although he was loth to admit it), and he spent his childhood in a number of small towns in southern Alberta and British Columbia. I didn't ask him nearly enough about his childhood before he passed away, and I hold on to those few reminiscences of his that I remember as emblematic of a childhood spent raucously and well: putting on cardboard armor and shooting BB guns at his friends; his class spontaneously standing in two long lines in the schoolyard, throwing paint-can lids as makeshift frisbees; him and his brother riding on a float in a local parade to promote the dairy where my grandfather worked; sitting on the hood of his parents' car, watching Sputnik go by overhead. It was a different time.

Much later - after he'd left Alberta, done his graduate work, joined the foreign service, had his own kids, served his country abroad - he discovered Bill Bryson. My mother can attest that Bryson's books did to my father what they've done to so many of his readers: prompted repeated, deep, bed-shaking bouts of laughter as he read just one more chapter before turning out the light. My dad, posted to Ireland and later to England, shared Bryson's tender love for the out-and-out wackyness of the British isles; he also shared Bryson's affection for the troubled, starry eyed and strident nation that is the United States.

I inherited a lot from my father, including his taste for Bryson. While originally most well known for his travel writing, the two-time American ex-patriot has gained a second fame recently for his critically and professionally acclaimed A Short History of Nearly Everything , a marvelous intellectual history of science. Bryson won't gain much attention for The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid, and perhaps that's inevitable. But it's also a shame, because Thunderbolt Kid is a remarkably successful social history of life in America in the 1950s.

The received wisdom today, fed by Hollywood and the baby boom generation, is that the 1950s were a repressive and tyrannical period, an interlude between the creation of universal opportunity at the end of the Second World War and the realization of that opportunity in the Summer of Love of 1968. Today "The Fifties" either means McCarthyism and blacklisting, or James Dean and Grease - the latter two being romanticized glorifications of rebel youths who prefigured the anti-establishment ethos of the boomers.

But one of these portrayals is incomplete, and the other is simply false. McCarthyism was undeniably a part of the 1950s - but far from defining the era, it was simply one manifestation of an infinitely complex cultural reality, one in which there really were communists, and they really were trying to subvert the government; one in which science really was changing the way Americans lived their lives, and cars really were changing the face of the American landscape, and people really did hope, and expect, that the future, just around the corner, would bring peace and prosperity and flying cars - just as long as it didn't bring nuclear war and annihilation first.

Bryson explores all of these themes; but he explores them through the eyes of the child that he was. And more importantly, he explores them through the eyes of a normal American, one who lit firecrackers and skipped class and snuck smokes in high school - just like all his friends, because that's what kids do, and not because he wanted to show The Man what was what.

Of course Bryson augments his personal anecdotes with a characteristically well researched and thoughtfully constructed social history of the era, using his own experiences and those pulled from contemporary newspaper and magazine accounts to contextualize the social changes that are too often caricatured today. And through Bryson's eyes we get a sense of life in America in the 1950s that's a thousand times as complex, and a thousand times as compelling than a thousand earnest films about censorship and blacklists and closet homosexuals and miserable wives.

Because Bryson's Fifties are the real thing; they are what he lived, and what most - including my father - lived. They were neither perfect nor imperfect; neither a movement in their own right nor a standard to be rebelled against. But it is impossible to come away from Thunderbolt Kid without thinking, as Bryson quite obviously does, that there was something special about the Fifties; that, perhaps for the last time in our recent history, growing up in the Fifties meant growing up with a sense of wonder, and of possibility, and without cynicism; and that the loss of that is hardly worth whatever we've gained instead.