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Books > Social sciences > Sociology, social studies > Social groups & communities > Associations, clubs, societies
'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.
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