Though Bryson focuses mostly on his childhood, he tells of many of the events that were happening at the time, including the development of the atomic bomb, and the beginnings of the civil rights movement. He tells of his first days in junior high and high school, and during both he began smoking, drinking, and stealing, although he didn’t get caught for any of it. He met Stephen Katz in junior high school, when they were both in the school's audio-visual club. Katz would accompany Bryson on many of his travel experiences. At the end of the book, Bryson tells the reader that "life moves on", and that he wishes that the world could be more similar to life in the 1950s and 1960s. The last lines of the book are, "What a wonderful world that would be. What a wonderful world it was. We won’t see its like again, I'm afraid."