Close Cover Before Striking

“The Dangerous Book for Boys” (Collins, 288 pages, $24.95), by the British brothers Conn and Hal Iggulden, is a big red textbook of facts and figures, diagrams and blueprints, games and projects, and history and advice, meant to encourage curiosity, self-reliance, and fearlessness in the male of the species. (Slap a brown grocery-bag dust jacket on the cover and you can read the brilliant thing undetected in math class or on the Metro-North Railroad.)Clever children will wonder whether the word “dangerous” isn’t a Trojan horse loaded with wholesome practical knowledge, like one of those falsely so-called computer games that teach you pre-algebra, or worse. Granted, the homemade go-cart or bow and arrow — or some gnarly Thunderdome-ready combination of the two — might lead to grieving parents, but grammar? Marbling paper? Grinding an italic nib? Are we raising hell or penning thank-you notes to Gammy and Gumpy?There’s little in this Crimson Treasury for mom and dad to go gray over. Worry, if you absolutely must, about timers and tripwires (surely a duffle of pipe bombs waits around the corner), or how to make cloth fireproof (why?), or hunting and cooking a rabbit (animal cruelty, combined with enuresis and firestarting, is a “triad predictive of adult crime,” according to the American Journal of Psychiatry, 122, 1431-1435). But apart from the tricky tree fort design, which the authors insist is “a job for dads,” that’s it for the truly dangerous. So why the title?If this book ought to worry anyone, it’s lazy teachers, cynical marketing executives, drug-pushing psychiatrists, and anyone else who takes advantage of children and the popular nonsense about their fragility and incompetence. The only negative reviews on Amazon.com whine about glaring omissions or that the contents aren’t dangerous enough. They’re on the right track, but they miss the point: A taste of what’s cool and challenging is all that kids need to strike out on their own bruised, scraped, sometimes concussed journeys of discovery.That belief is what makes the Igguldens two wild and subversive guys. They’ve bequeathed our country a textbook for boys who hope to become men, whereas the present system produces boys who can only hope to become older, fatter, more dependent boys. The Igguldens detail the rules of soccer (along with stickball and rugby), but in their section on word origins they also give the etymology and definition of “hooligan,” not to mention “quisling,” “thug,” and “assassin.”And “chivalry.” The book is a deeply moral one, which recognizes that just because boys will be boys doesn’t mean they have to be stupid or malicious ones. It’s never too early to memorize useful Latin phrases or Shakespeare quotations or poems by Kipling and Shelley. Of “Ozymandias,” they write, in their lapidary textbook style, “This poem was written as a commentary on human arrogance.” Your average elementary school teacher would have complained that the vocabulary is too difficult, or the verse lacking in relevance, which means it isn’t about drugs or teen pregnancy. The Igguldens, like most boys, know better.There is, of course, an entirely justifiable vogue — one hopes it will become a tradition — for letting girls in on the boy stuff. Remember, before launching into a feminist fit about the title: If you give the book to a young miss, she’ll have twice as much fun for believing she’s in a forbidden locker-room of dinosaurs, military history from Thermopylae to Navajo code-talkers, dog tricks, coin tricks, and “Books Every Boy Should Read.” (Ian Fleming’s James Bond series may not be best for establishing healthy gender relations, but who cares?) Be sure to razor out the two pages about how to talk to girls. It doesn’t work if both sides have the secret document.Advice for parents: We live in an age when the biggest danger to kids, apart from the bogeyman of Internet stalkers, may be Wiiitis — a strain of carpal tunnel syndrome acquired by shackling oneself for hours to Nintendo’s latest incursion into childhood. It’s no use trying to shield your offspring from the disastrous influence of popular culture. It’ll find them one way or another. Better to set that influence next to something it has no hope of competing with: the excitement and pride of knowing semaphore or ciphers or Robert Scott or bugs and fossils.In their chapter about killing poor little bunnies, the Igguldens write, “If you buy a pork chop, we think you should realize what has gone into providing that meat for you. In a sense, killing for food is a link with ancestors going back to the caves.” Their introduction to first aid goes a step further. It says, in effect, you can get hurt out there — the adult world has its peril as well as its rewards, and you can’t have the one without the other. That’s the first and best lesson of growing up, and there’s no better vehicle for it than this thrilling bible.Mr. Beck last wrote for these pages on Vice President Gore.

Close Cover Before Striking

Close Cover Before Striking

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