Friday, May 25, 2007

The Boys of Summer

Al Mohler recommends a Dangerous Book for Boys.

The Iggulden brothers believe that boys need to get away from the computer screen, go outside, and learn to enjoy the world and make their way in it. “Boyhood is all about curiosity,” they advise. Boys need to know how to build a treehouse and how to find north in the dark -- and they need to know that they know these things. As the brothers explain:

How do latitude and longitude work? How do you make secret ink, or send the cipher that Julius Caesar used with his generals? You'll find the answers inside. It was written by two men who would have given away the cat to get this book when they were young. It wasn’t a particularly nice cat. Why did we write it now? Because these things are important still and we wished we knew them better. There are few things as satisfying as tying a decent bowline knot when someone needs a loop, or simply knowing what happened at Gettysburg and the Alamo. The tales must be told and retold, or the memories slowly die.

They need to fall off things occasionally, or--and this is the important bit--they'll take worse risks on their own. If we do away with challenging playgrounds and cancel school trips for fear of being sued, we don't end up with safer boys--we end up with them walking on train tracks. In the long run, it's not safe at all to keep our boys in the house with a PlayStation. It's not good for their health or their safety.

A rival publisher took the book home to his eight-year-old son, who promptly jumped up from in front of the television and talked his dad into testing paper airplanes long after bedtime. “That’s the good news,” the dad said. “The bad news is that he now expects me to build him a treehouse.”

Jane Friedman, Chief Executive at HarperCollins and herself the mother of two sons and two stepsons, is sticking by the book. There is no plan for a girls’ version, she said. “Boys are very different,” she observed.

Yes they are, Ms. Friedman, and that is why books like this are important. Boys want to be taken seriously as boys, and taught how to become men.

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