Product Description

'A trained scout will see little signs and tracks, he puts them together in his mind and quickly reads a meaning from them such as an untrained man would never arrive at.' A startling amalgam of Zulu war-cry and imperial and urban myth, of borrowed tips on health and hygiene, and object lessons in woodcraft, Robert Baden-Powell's Scouting for Boys (1908) is the original blueprint and 'self-instructor' of the Boy Scout Movement. An all-time bestseller in the English-speaking world, second only to the Bible, this primer of 'yarns and pictures' constitutes probably the most influential manual for youth ever published. Yet the book is at the same time a roughly composed hodge-podge of jingoist lore and tracker legend, padded with lengthy quotations from adventure fiction and B-P's own autobiography, and seamed through with the multiple anxieties of its time: fears of degeneration, concerns about masculinity and self-restraint, invasion paranoia. Elleke Boehmer's edition of Scouting for Boys is the first to reprint the original text and illustrations, and her fine introduction investigates a book that has been cited as an authority by militarists and pacifists, capitalists and environmentalists alike.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #111760 in Books
• Published on: 2005-02-10
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 448 pages

About the Author
Elleke Boehmer is the author of Empire, the National and the Postcolonial (2002), Colonial and Postcolonial Literature (1995), and Stories of Women (forthcoming), as well as of many articles on postcolonial writing and theory. She is also the author of short stories and three novels, most recently Bloodlines. For OWC she has edited Empire Writing. She is the Series Editor of the Oxford Studies in Postcolonial Literatures.

Customer Reviews

"The British Empire wants your help"
At the very beginning of the twentieth century, retired General Robert Baden-Powell, the hero of the siege of Mafeking, coalesced his ideas for an organization to train young British boys in scouting for the British Empire. Not a very organized thinker, Baden-Powell borrowed heavily from all sorts of unrelated resources - newspaper articles, military dispatches, fiction, and much more - and produced this, his first book on scouting. Originally published as six separate books, this book brings all of them together, complete with original illustrations.

Now, as might be expected from its roots, this book reflects a lot of the biases and ways of thinking from Edwardian England. But, leaving that aside, this is a fun and interesting book that shows clearly the forms that have stayed with the Boy Scouts movement to this very day. The introduction was written by Elleke Boehmer, a professor of Colonial and Postcolonial literature, and is a fairly predictable deconstruction/analysis of B-P and his movement.

Now, as a newcomer to Scouting (my son is a Tenderfoot) did I find anything useful in this book? I sure did. Robert Baden-Powell was very knowledgeable about the subject, and this book sure shows it. (I never thought of tying my shoes like that!) Of course some of the information is out of date, especially the first-aid information, so it isn't really usable by the boys "as is." But, this is a nice resource, one that shows you where Scouting started.

Oh, and I must say that I actually enjoyed the somewhat jumbled organization of this book. It isn't as scholarly and antiseptic as modern Boy Scout books, and the stories and tales laced throughout make the reading much more fun. Plus, I did find the focus on some subjects, such as logic and deductive reasoning, to be quite interesting. I loved this book, and highly recommend it to you!

From another time, but still relevant?
Bought this for a bit of a laugh initially, that and the Ian Hislop program on TV.

Its parochial, jingoistic, self centred and too focussed on 'self abuse' ..

but...

It has some pretty good stuff! Its ridiculously egalitarian considering when it was written, and respectful of all independent of wealth, race, creed, etc. All in all, kids should read this.

I finished this book with an odd feeling of pride in being British. The values promoted in this book are my values, despite never having been a scout myself.

God save the Queen!

INtriguing insight into early century salutary journal
I am hoping this is a verbatim reprint of the original title, a copy of which I once had but lost. Subjects covered include cleanliness in the wild (bowel-movements) and avoidance of beastliness (I won't spoil it for you). It is not so much the subjects themselves which inspire our post-modern hilarity, rather the way in which the author invites you to infer them from his language. A must for all afficionados of kitsch