Boy Scouts of America Books

When Boy Scout George Fremont goes to his boss's office, and finds him unconscious, and on the verge of death, he quickly becomes the prime suspect. But, patrol leader Ned Nestor, who has quite a talent for solving mysteries knows that Fremont is not guilty, and quickly spirits him off to the Rio Grande and Mexico, where the threads of this mystery are leading. There's an international conspiracy to begin a war between Mexico and the United States, and its up to Fremont and Nestor and some other Boy Scouts to put things right!

This book was first published in 1911, when the Boy Scouts of America was only one year old! Scoutmaster George Harvey Ralphson (1879-1940) penned a series of books with Boy Scout heroes, which put the Scouts in dangerous situations where their Scout training brought them through. Sadly, like many authors of the era, who wrote Boy Scout pulp fiction for boys, Mr. Ralphson went rather far with his characters, showing each of the Scouts armed and going into very dangerous situations indeed. And so, the Boy Scouts of America clamped down on such stories, fearing that they were giving people a wrong idea of what Scouting is about.

So yes, this book does not show the stereotypical Boy Scout, but it is nonetheless a rousing good story, full of adventure, bravery, patriotism, action, and good fun! It is the sort of muscular fiction that boys read 100 years ago, and it is still a great read. So, if you are a fan of early-twentieth century boys' fiction, then you must read this book.

[If you want a great, old-fashioned Boy Scout book, that shows what Scouting should be, then you must read "Tom Slade" by Percy K. Fitzhugh; it is the crown of the genre!]

I thought it was as a good book that told alot about freestyle biking but never said any hard tricks and how to do them, but still told about the X-Games.

I bought this book for my husband and he loves this one also. He can't believe some of the attacks on the boy scouts. He is only half way through and he loves it. Some people just need to get a life and leave the Boy Scouts alone. Just a thought: This is the only guidance that some of these boys get, being raised by a single parent or grandparents. The Boy Scouts ROCK!!

Every scouter should read this book.If we don't speak out for what's right. We will have no scouting or any youth program . Loose the youth,we loose the country.

Lt. Col. Oliver North's foreword to Zeiger's book says the Boy Scouts have come under fire for promoting "what many of us euphemistically call traditional values." (p.vii).

Euphemistically???

North's choice of words inadvertently reveals what he and other "social conservatives" obviously know in their hearts -- that the Boy Scouts of America's current campaign against gay youth and religious liberals is grounded in something other than America's proudest traditions and values. Hans Zeiger removes any doubt, by launching a spiteful attack not just on religious liberals, but on the American mainstream's respect for religious pluralism and the rights of minorities.

Zeiger denounces as "superficial" the values "espoused from the mainstream pulpits," for example, charging that "Christian churches are largely to blame" for destroying "manly virtue" with a "gutless ecumenism." (pp. 40, 56). Zeiger apparently prefers sectarian strife to the loving acceptance of our neighbors that Jesus preached.

Zeiger lauds the BSA's adoption of policies hostile to the values of religious liberals in particular. "At the beginning of American Scouting," Zeiger acknowledges, "progressive Social Gospel churches were among the biggest supporters of the movement." (p. 147). Zeiger oozes contempt for what he calls the "sissified, watered-down Social Gospel" of churches that originally fostered Scouting. (p. 147).

As it happens, the BSA was launched from the White House in 1911 by President William Howard Taft. A dedicated Unitarian, Taft served both as president of the General Conference of Unitarian and other Christian Churches until it was absorbed by the American Unitarian Association, and also as president of the International Congress of Religious Liberals. The BSA's official history explains that "[t]he national character of the Boy Scouts of America was strikingly brought before the people of the country, in the very beginning, by holding the first annual meeting in the White House, on February 14 and 15, 1911, at the invitation of President Taft, Honorary President of the Boy Scouts of America." (William D. Murray, The History of the Boy Scouts of America p.309 (1937)).

President Taft might be surprised to learn that by 1992, the youth organization that he helped launch had banned his own denomination from its Religious Relationships Committee. In 1998 the BSA threw Taft's denomination out of its Religious Awards Program. The BSA, writes Zeiger, "was forced to drop the Unitarian Universalist religious patch from its program." (p. 151).

The denomination's offense? Teaching its children that discrimination is wrong.

Taft's denomination, it should be noted, includes many of America's most celebrated churches: The church of the Mayflower Pilgrims who landed at Plymouth Rock in 1620, the churches that John Winthrop's Puritans founded for their shining "city on a hill," the Philadelphia church that the Rev. Dr. Joseph Priestley helped organize after fleeing persecution in England, the church of John and Abigail Adams, where the second President and his wife are buried, and the church that their son, our sixth President, John Quincy Adams organized so that Unitarians could have a place to worship in Washington, D.C.

The BSA is so fundamentally hostile to these churches that it will not allow their children to participate in Scouting on an equal footing with children of other faiths. They are not permitted to earn or wear their denomination's religious award, or to have their denomination represented on the BSA's Religious Relationships Committee. And those who refuse to subscribe to the BSA's "Declaration of Religious Principles," which labels nonbelievers as not "the best kind of citizen," are excluded from Scouting altogether.

The BSA's discriminatory policies are similarly hostile to the values of mainstream Judaism - - so hostile that in January 2001 Reform Judaism, the largest movement in American Judaism, had to sever sever longstanding ties with the BSA. Reform Judaism's national leadership called upon synagogues to stop sponsoring Scout troops, and urged Jewish parents to withdraw their children from Scouting.

Many Jews, both Reform and others, felt compelled to leave Scouting. Steven Spielberg, who was not just an Eagle Scout but a "Distinguished Eagle," resigned from the BSA's Board of Advisers in 2001 - - so "deeply saddened" to see the BSA "publicly participating in discrimination" that he could no longer serve the organization. (p.10).

Zeiger's response: "If a Scout declares himself incapable or unwilling to do his best to do his duty, he is no more a Scout than a rat is an eagle." (p.10). That Zeiger himself may have Jewish grandparents cannot excuse such offensive rhetoric.

Not content to defend the BSA's discrimination, Zeiger feels compelled to denounce any organization that will not similarly shun homosexuals and exclude religious liberals. Zeiger calls Big Brothers Big Sisters, for example, "the vehicle for the destruction of thousands of young lives." (p. 81). The Girl Scouts of America, Zeiger insists, "have thoroughly accommodated themselves to political correctness in order to suit the tastes of radical feminists." (p.155). As a consequence, writes Zeiger, "[t]he Girl Scouts have become a more accurate reflection of modern culture than the Boy Scouts." (p. 157).

And that is Zeiger's problem - - he detests American culture, and the value it has traditionally placed on democratic pluralism. His cause is a "culture war, of which the Boy Scouts is perhaps the most salient symbol," using children to battle against mainstream American values. (p. 173).

Zeiger's book demonstrates just how far the organization has strayed from its original mission and values.

Eric Alan Isaacson

[For those who may be interested, my full-length review essay on Zeiger's book has been published in volume 5, number 3 of the Pierce Law Review, as "Assaulting America's Mainstream Values: Hans Zeiger's Get Off My Honor: The Assault on the Boy Scouts of America," 5 Pierce L. Rev. 433 (April 2007). It is archived on the Pierce Law Review's web site, and can be found with a little Googling. My study documenting the BSA's systematic discrimination against Unitarian Universalists has been published in volume 17 of the George Mason University Civil Rights Law Journal.]

The scouts need to be freed from idealogical idiots like the one who wrote this book.

When I first heard about this book, I knew it had an important message, but I never expected to have to quell the urge to highlight or underline nearly every sentence in the book.

This book succinctly summarized numerous ails of our society, and explains not only the root of the problem, but the solutions for fixing the problems that threaten our youth, our nation, and our very way of life.

Scouting is not about bigotry, or discrimination. (A scout is a friend to all) It is about internalizing a moral code that makes boys into men. Not herculean, testosterone-crazed, muscle-bound, abusive men, but men with values, morals, and character worthy of admiration and leadership.

Many of the worlds leaders would do well to implement even a small portion of these ideals into their own life.

If the Boy Scouts ever fall, it will be yet another signal of the irreparable damage done by the "liberal left's" policies of appeasement and persistent alleviation of responsibility and accountability for one's own actions.

Leaders, Teachers, Parents, and young men around the globe would do well to read and internalize the instruction contained in this book.

I've purchased many books (new and used) dealing with Scouting, and this is the first one that I had an almost physical reaction when I opened it. For the rather expensive price ($21.95) for a paperback, I was expecting a book on the par of Kett's "Rites of Passge" or MacLeod's "Building Character." Needless to say, the small paper size, the large font size, the paltry number of endnotes, and the limited bibliography was a disappointment.

To be perfectly honest, it looks more like a college paper than a published professional biography. This sense was confirmed when I noticed that the author was citing an undergraduate unpublished paper as a source! And a source for a US Congressional Report that any good researcher can obtain with no problem.

Unfortunately, a serious biography of Boyce has yet to be written and published. If you'e wanting to read such a work, you'll have to wait. If you really want to read this book, then wait a year and you'll be able to buy it when it is marked down to it's real value in the used book stores.

For readers interested in Boy Scout history, and especially about the organizaton's founder, this is a valuable biography. No previous book on the Scouts has offered more than a few sentences about Boyce. The "Lone Scout" research, index, and narrative style are all excellent. I especially enjoyed the chapter on his African safari, the "Balloonograph Expedition." What an adventure!

Unlike the "reviewer" from Houston, I liked the book.

William Boyce was a man of whom little is truly known. There is no Boyce Library and Archive and there is not any overflowing amount of information about him in the BSA National Archives. He was an important fringe character whose story should be known.

Due to this lack of information, LONE SCOUT is the first book that goes into the persona of the man, the man who is generally credited with bringing the idea of Boy Scouting to the USA in terms of the present organization known as the BSA. In my research of the beginnings of the worldwide Movement of Boy Scouting, LONE SCOUT has been a rather good resource on this topic that enabled me to delve further into the story of Boyce with regard to his role in the BSA. And since this is the first substantive biography on him, it should be the one upon which all future ones should be compared.

At this point in time, Ms. Petterchak's book is the most definitive look into Mr. Boyce's life, and to my literary knowledge, font size has never been a critical determinant in discerning the quality of content. A panning argument of "large font size" is cursory and of little importance.

Give this book a read, it's highly worth one's time.

Much of the advice in this 50s edition seems out-of-date today (as when a role model beats up another boy for abusing a dog), but the anachronistic earnestness makes this little book fun to browse through. Written for scoutmasters and their assistants, most of the book is a catalogue of games meant to instruct the scout on some point of conduct related to scouting. As a non-scout, I was still pleasantly surprised to see that many of the activities can be fully enjoyed by anyone who is interested in upright citizenship or the outdoors. This could be a handy pocket guide for someone looking to learn basic woods lore, or knot-tying, for example. The writing itself is pretty tortuous, with lots of clunky prose and even confusing sentences. But that shouldn't prevent an interested reader from skimming through and finding some fun activities to do with children or even adult friends on a camping trip.

This book is out of date now, you can get a new one from the Boy Scouts of America, and probably elsewhere on Amazon.

Pretty much useless now unless you collect Scouting memorabilia.

This book is all information and merit badge requirements. I completed the merit badge, so I found it pretty useful. But if you were just to read through it page by page, it would be mind-numbingly boring.

Agree with the other reviewer, this wolf cubscout book is 48 years out of date and has absolutely no value to me or my 7 year old cubscout. seller should state whether the book is current of not.

The book was not the newest edition. It was several years old. It is completely different than the new requirements. So, it was completely useless to me.

This is the outdated version! Don't buy it! I am a Boy Scout who has attained the rank of life and i know that they completely revised the book in 1998, this book is obsolete! Got to your local scout shop and get it, dont buy this one!

overpriced, get a new one for less. If you want this you must be in sea scouts so save a few dollars and support national. your local scout shop can order this one.