The eagerly anticipated follow-up to the bestselling phenomenon The Daring Book for Girls is an even more daring guide to everything from making a raft to learning how to play football to the art of the Japanese Tea ceremony. This second volume, with all new original material, promises to be even more of a daring adventure than the first. Girls will learn how to surf, get horseback riding tips, make a labyrinth, find out about April Fool’s Day history and pranks, how to organize a croquet tou
$ 14.46
A Treasure, & an Antidote,
Honestly, I want to hand this book to every girl I know, and the boys as well (pink typeface and Girl label be damned, this book is a powder keg of information and ideas for any kid). I am pleased that it covers so many topics I want my kids to know well, e.g., batik techniques and history (p.99), commonly confused words like imply and infer (p. 141), and the specifics of quality private eye work (p. 177).
What I truly appreciate, and what makes the Daring books transcend the How To label, is the activities’ historical and often rebellious context. Why should our kids want to know how to waltz (p. 78)? How about because it was considered scandalous — the dancing partners touched! And vulgar, forbidden — it was easy to learn and didn’t require a dance master!
Mostly, I am dazzled by the amount of good, hard, enticingly written information amassed in the Double Daring book. I want kids to know everything in it. I want them all to know exactly who Eleanor of Aquitaine was, and how startling her long, accomplished, independent life was compared to most women of her era. I want them to know the fundamentals of rhetoric, how to make a raft, the story of Ada Lovelace, how to join the circus, how to say thank you in scores of languages, how to make snowglobes, how to conduct an orchestra, and how to make rope ladders.
The Double Daring book is buoyed by positivity, and focuses on cultivating competence, independence, willingness to experiment, and open-ended fun. It provides multiple short biographies of women whose lives exemplified these attitudes. These role models are an antidote to heavily-marketed (and in some cases marketing-originated) books like The Clique series, which my daughter and her friends crave, and in which junior high-aged girls live lives of insecurity, negativity, and cruelty, while obsessing about label-spangled fashion, unrealistic body images, and social machinations. Ptui.
If you want your girls to value knowledge and abilities like they do store-bought items, get them The Double Daring Book for Girls. I truly believe it has the power to inspire and edify any child with a curious mind, while simultaneously countering media-induced materialism. It is a treasure.
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|Everything you forgot that you needed to know — and more!,
How can you not like a book that tells you how to dye your hair with Kool-Aid, how to make a lava lamp, how to perform a Japanese Tea Ceremony, what the meaning of courage is, how to catch a fish, how to run a magazine, how to be a private eye, how to become President of the United States, all about the Underground Railroad, how to dance the Cotton-Eyed Joe, how to shoot pool, how to say no (and how to say yes), and — for pete’s sake — how to run away and join the circus. And that’s less than 10{660353129f8d892044c993645a1c75194301fec6786a7f617c15adde0b0011e9} of the topics in the book. The information in here is terribly important, it is positively invaluable lore and instruction.
I defy anyone to pick up this book and tell me that they made it through reading the Table of Contents without smiling, reminiscing, and also being intrigued. It’s a seemingly random collection of really neat stuff that you find you are thrilled someone had the time, energy and brains to actually document. It’s the stuff that’s told around the campfires, discussed over dinner tables, and taught over sidewalk chalk in the driveway.
Get it for your daughter, get it for your niece, or get it for yourself. It makes a wonderful addition to any girl’s book collection, and when you give it was a gift, you will know that you’ve struck gold.
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|Better than the Original,
As with The Daring Book for Girls a certain amount of derivativeness was inevitable in a book that was clearly (and admittedly) written in order to fill the niche left unfilled by the brilliant but for-boy’s-only The Dangerous Book for Boys, but it was probably a mistake carrying it as far as the title. As the Brothers Iggulden point out in their justification, most boys (and only some girls) seek out danger (or at least the APPEARANCE of danger), but most girls don’t. Ms. Buchanan and Ms. Peskowitz appear to recognize this, but apparently felt pressured into the rather misleading use of “Daring” in the title when “Fun” would have been more appropriate. (The only “daring” in this book are the daring deeds recorded in the exploits of the female princesses, queens, heroines, pirates, inventors, scientists, explorers, spies, leaders, athletes, and other historical figures included for inspirational purposes.)
Again the authors have assembled quite a number of fun activities for girls in pursuit of their admirable stated goals of slowing down the early termination of girlhood and the forced induction into grownup-hood, “becoming tweens and teens and adult women before their time.”
Note: if you already have or plan to purchase the original book or either or both of the pocket books: The Pocket Daring Book for Girls: Things to Do or The Pocket Daring Book for Girls: Wisdom & Wonder, I can assure you that none of the material in this book duplicates anything in the first three books; neither does anything in this book depend on owning or even having read any of the first three books, though occasional reference is made back to similar items included in earlier books.
Note: Anyone who has been reluctant to purchase the original big blue book because as I and a number of reviewers have noted, it includes a handful of truly questionable activities, which devout Christians will consider dabbling with the occult, and which others may question because in the absence of supernatural powers they are arguably a big fat waste of time, have another reason for choosing to purchase this book. Having read all the way through it, I can assure them that no such offending items have been included in this book.
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