`These are Not Small Things'

On Sunday, one of the books we gave our middle son for his seventh birthday was The Dangerous Book for Boys, by Conn and Hal Iggulden, brothers from England. As soon as I read a brief review of it several months ago in the Wall Street Journal, I ordered it for Michael. It has become a bestseller, first in England, now in the United States, and for once here’s a bestseller worth celebrating. The Igguldens distill their philosophy in the first sentence of the introduction, titled “I Didn’t Have This Book When I Was a Boy”:

“In this age of video games and cell phones, there must be a place for knots, tree houses, and stories of incredible courage.”

I assume the use of “dangerous” in the title was suggested by a marketing twit at HarperCollins in the U.K. – effective word choice, but misleading. Chapters are devoted to “Making a Bow and Arrow,” “Making a Go-Cart,” and “Making Cloth Fireproof” – irresistible projects for any boy and probably most girls, but the Igguldens, to their credit, also include chapters on “Understanding Grammar,” “Sampling Shakespeare,” “The Game of Chess,” “Seven Poems Every Boy Should Know,” and “Books Every Boy Should Read.” The Dangerous Book for Boys is, in part, an exercise in nostalgia, a fact emphasized by the volume’s beautifully retro design. And no doubt feminists and other spoilsports will bewail the book’s presumption of sex-linked behaviors, though it’s hardly a Taliban-style call to arms. It’s working assumption is that boys are complicated creatures, open to experiences beyond the numbing idiocy of NASCAR, videogames, and professional wrestling. The Igguldens begin their poetry chapter like this:

“Yes, a boy should be able to climb trees, grow crystals and tie a decent bowline knot. However, a boy will grow into a man and no man should be completely ignorant of these poems. They are the ones that spoke to us when we were young. Find a big tree and climb it. Read one of these poems aloud to yourself, high in the branches. All the authors are long dead, but they may still speak to you.”

Marvelous advice. Here’s their list, a mix of the inevitable and the unexpected: Kipling’s “If,” Shelley’s “Ozmandias,” selections from four stanzas of Whitman’s 52-stanza “Song of Myself,” Henley’s “Invictus,” Sir Henry Newbolt’s “Vitae Lampada,” Frost’s “The Road Not Taken,” and John Masefield’s “Sea-Fever.” There was a time that lasted even into my boyhood, into the nineteen-sixties, when educated people knew these poems and memorized at least snatches of them (in my case, the Kipling, Shelley, Whitman, Henley and Masefield). I can already hear the whining about imperialism, but any young person unmoved by “I am master of my fate:/I am the captain of my soul” has atrophied vital parts. As the Igguldens write at the end of the poetry chapter:

“There are hundreds more poems that have stayed with us as we grow older. That is the magic perhaps, that a single line can bring comfort in grief, or express the joy of a birth. These are not small things.”

“Books Every Boy Should Read” is spottier, though I confess much ignorance. Of their 34 suggestions (some consisting of more than one title; a series, for instance), I’ve read 17, not read seven, and never heard of 10. The list is rather heavy on fantasy and science fiction, which I haven’t read in almost 40 years, and I suspect a number of the names are English. The authors Willard Price, Enid Blyton, Raymond Briggs, David Eddings, Terry Pratchett, Orson Scott Card, David Feintuch, David Gemmell, Raymond E. Feist, and Norton Juster mean nothing to me. And I’m bursting with pride that I’ve never read J.K. Rowling and Stephen King. But I’m delighted to report the Igguldens include Roald Dahl, Kipling, Twain, Swift and an inspired choice, Jerome K. Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat, which they call “the funniest book ever written.”

Their introduction to the book chapter is eminently sane: “The danger here is that you’ll try to read books that are too hard for your age. The choices are from those books we enjoyed, but this is a list all men should have read when they were boys.”

Conn and Hal Iggulden have written a book that stirs envy in the hearts of former boys who grew up without it, though I suspect some of us could compile useful supplementary chapters on dirty limericks, pyrotechnics, vivisection and Fun with Bowling Balls.