'The Dangerous Book for Boys' Attempts to Recapture the (Almost) Lost Arts of Boyhood

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Joan Oleck -- School Library Journal, 6/27/2007

Forget about snips and snails and puppy dog tails. Boys today are made of Nintendos and iPods and video games. That's why British authors Conn and Hal Iggulden wrote The Dangerous Book for Boys (HarperCollins, 2006), and this year retooled their best seller for the U.S. market. Think of it as a reference book for boyhood: how to build a tree house, tie a knot, make a paper airplane. Stuff about bugs, fossils, fishing, baseball, constellations. "This book will help you recapture those Sunday afternoons and long summers," promises the book's introduction. In an e-mail interview, SLJ asked Conn Iggulden to explain how.

Why did you and your brother write this book?

The idea for it had been kicking around in my head ever since my son was born in 2000. I started looking around for books of the sort I’d had as a boy, and though I found a few pallid modern ones, I couldn’t find any single compendium aimed unashamedly at boys—so I set out to write one. My brother was the obvious choice as cowriter as he’d been there for those crucial years.

What is the significance of the word "dangerous" in the title?

Boyhood is often about learning your limits and taking risks—it’s a part of the male psyche. It’s not right or wrong, it just is. Some of the things we included have elements of danger: bows and arrows, catapults, hunting, using a knife, carpentry, and so on. In the main, though, it’s the attitude we wanted to recapture, when danger was exciting and the idea of a boy falling out of a tree didn't terrify parents. [Also] it was a reaction to the safety culture and the particular part that thinks boys are safer if you keep them indoors on a PC or PlayStation.

Did you do any of these boy things when you were growing up?

Of course! We grew up in a suburb of London with a garden of about 30 square feet, but there was a local park as well. We built a treehouse back then, cut bows and arrows, hunted in the local woods, grew crystals, made crystals, and a hundred other things. Rule number one of the book was that we had to make everything again, to be certain it worked and to learn where the problems were… If we’d loved it then, it went in.

You seem to be mourning the fact that boys today are missing out on some important skills and experiences their fathers and grandfathers enjoyed.

I wouldn’t go back to the past for anything—think of the dentistry!—but we dropped the ball with boys in the last 30 years. Our grandparents took enormous satisfaction from understanding the nuts and bolts of language, but a generation of teachers decided grammar and male role models should be quietly dropped. This isn’t just nostalgia, it’s where we went wrong. History became all about comparing "secondary" and "tertiary" sources and lost sight completely of the fact that it is a treasure trove of exciting stories of courage, betrayal, love, honor, and triumph.

Should parents and educators do anything to rectify the reality [of electronics saturation] you describe?

We need to find some way of protecting schools. If your son falls off a slide and breaks his arm (as I did once) you can’t sue, or the next generation of boys won’t have slides or dangerous games of any kind. As for technology, I loved computer games when I was in my teens, but some schools introduce kids to computers at the age of five. Boys of five should be learning to read and do math—as well as understanding why the sun comes up in the east, and generally learning everything they can. The computers have become all important somehow and they just aren’t that healthy.

You wrote that you "thought long and hard" about what advice to give boys about girls. How did you come up with the advice you did include?

I didn’t want to do some awful coy, cynical, postmodern book with in-jokes for adults. I wanted it to be innocent because childhood is an innocent time. The actual content was written with a light touch and meant to be funny—though it’s good advice as well!

What got left out from the British edition? What got added? Miles for kilometers?

Stuff kilometers! I use miles and feet and always have. I can still pace out my garden in yards—you try pacing out meters and see what happens. I like using both systems, so that it’s clear they are both manmade, artificial things, like centigrade and Fahrenheit. Boys love to know this stuff. Apart from that, we cut cricket, [Admiral Horatio] Nelson, and the British Empire and added chapters on the Navajo code talkers of World War II, the Wright Brothers, Gettysburg, and the Alamo. I’ve always been a fan of America; so there are a number of references in there already—you can’t do a boys’ book without mentioning Neil Armstrong or the space shuttle.

Any chance we'll see a "dangerous book for girls"?

At the last count, I believe there were four in the works—not written by me. I have two daughters and I truly hope the authors make a decent job of it. Why? Boys and girls care about different things. It’s like I said in the book: there will always be the occasional girl interested in this stuff, but on the whole, boys are more interested in the use of urine as secret ink than girls are.