A Dangerous Book?

Or a misguided fear of a dangerous mind…

I was intrigued (or maybe that’s incensed) recently by an essay in Newsweek about The Dangerous Book for Boys—an Amazon bestseller and a book that my nine-year-old son, since receiving it for his birthday less than a month ago, has been carrying around under his arm wherever he goes. Dogeared and bookmarked, the book has become his constant companion and the genesis of at least a half-dozen creative adventures with a dozen more written down in his Moleskine for future use. In other words, it’s a book that has more than captured my son’s imagination.

Jennie Yabroff, in her Newsweek essay, contends that the reason for The Dangerous Book’s whopping success is a “…nostalgia for the halcyon world of our fathers and grandfathers…,” “…anxieties about the present…,” or because of conservatives who see the book as a “…corrective to the ‘feminization’ of the culture.” I find her assessment as cynical as I find the title of the essay and a million miles from the truth.

Nostalgia requires an understanding and an idealization of some long lost past. A time when the grass was greener, or the sun was brighter, the summer days longer, and where the world was a much better place. In other words, nostalgia requires you to have some history. A halcyon to dream about. Some kind of quantifiable past that you can look back fondly upon and pine for.

Certainly there are those who are buying this book for nostalgic reasons. My sixty-plus year-old uncle loves the book. He ran out and bought a copy after seeing my son’s.

My mother thinks it’s great too. She said it, “looked old,” like the books she had when she was a kid.

But my son?

He’s nine-years-old.

He has nothing to be nostalgic about, unless you’re talking about the play he made at first base a couple of weeks ago or the trip to the lake that we took last week. Hardly some great past, but certainly the halcyon of his future.

So the book’s appeal? That Dangerous book’s appeal, has nothing to do with some misguided sense of nostalgia or any glamorization of how much better it was in “days gone by.” The book appeals to something far simpler: the desire to learn, have fun, and to be able to create things with your own hands.

Nostalgia can sell thing’s to people with memories but it can’t create desire in those whose past is still in their future. Especially when nostalgia has to compete with iPods, Wiis, Tivos, and Gamecubes. What The Dangerous Book for Boys appeals to is the imagination. And it’s that alone that makes this book successful.