Boyhood Adventures

Boyhood Adventures (Second Edition) is a work of historical fiction based on the experiences of three eight-year-old boys living in Texarkana, Arkansas, in 1953. Dennis Williams leads Lee Farmer and Frank Cherry on wild and crazy nocturnal, supernatural exploits worthy of detailing in any personal journal. The main characters react in very different ways to each adventurous sortie. Dennis, the adventure seeker, is relentless in his pursuit of adrenaline. He is bolder than he is bright. Lee has become addicted to excitement and will follow Dennis almost anywhere if it means he doesn't have to listen to another radio program. Frank is the antithesis of Dennis. While reticent to explore the local graveyard, he thrives on his association with his two friends. Readers of the original version of this book seemed to enjoy it. Some posted reviews saying parts of the story reminded them of a few of their own childhood experiences.

Ernest Boehnert (Baynert) was born on a farm near Carry the Kettle First Nation and grew up in the town of Wolseley, Saskatchewan. He arrived at the end of the Great Depression and the beginning of World War II. This was a turbulent time in world history. Ernie Bill’s childhood was during the 1940’s. The way of life was very different than modern times. People did not have the many technological things we take for granted today. Children often made their own entertainment because television, video games, cell phones, and electronic devices did not exist. Ernie Bill looks at this era through the eyes of a child. He provides a unique snapshot of his childhood that is descriptive, often humourous, reflective, and occasionally nostalgic. Ernie Bill captures the scene of being a boy on the prairies who had an imagination and ingenuity to meet any challenge.

Ernest Boehnert (Baynert) was born on a farm near Carry the Kettle First Nation and grew up in the town of Wolseley, Saskatchewan. He arrived at the end of the Great Depression and the beginning of World War II. This was a turbulent time in world history. Ernie Bill’s childhood was during the 1940’s. The way of life was very different than modern times. People did not have the many technological things we take for granted today. Children often made their own entertainment because television, video games, cell phones, and electronic devices did not exist. Ernie Bill looks at this era through the eyes of a child. He provides a unique snapshot of his childhood that is descriptive, often humourous, reflective, and occasionally nostalgic. Ernie Bill captures the scene of being a boy on the prairies who had an imagination and ingenuity to meet any challenge.

When Horace Greeley published his famous imperative, “Go West, young man, and grow up with the country,” the frontier was already synonymous with a distinctive type of idealized American masculinity. But Greeley’s exhortation also captured popular sentiment surrounding changing ideas of American boyhood; for many educators, politicians, and parents, raising boys right seemed a pivotal step in securing the growing nation’s future. This book revisits these narratives of American boyhood and frontier mythology to show how they worked against and through one another—and how this interaction shaped ideas about national character, identity, and progress. The intersection of ideas about boyhood and the frontier, while complex and multifaceted, was dominated by one arresting notion: in the space of the West, boys would grow into men and the fledgling nation would expand to fulfill its promise. Frontiers of Boyhood explores this myth and its implications and ramifications through western history, childhood studies, and a rich cultural archive. Detailing surprising intersections between American frontier mythology and historical notions of child development, the book offers a new perspective on William “Buffalo Bill” Cody’s influence on children and childhood; on the phenomenon of “American Boy Books”; the agency of child performers, differentiated by race and gender, in Wild West exhibitions; and the cultural work of boys’ play, as witnessed in scouting organizations and the deployment of mass-produced toys. These mutually reinforcing and complicating strands, traced through a wide range of cultural modes, from social and scientific theorizing to mass entertainment, lead to a new understanding of how changing American ideas about boyhood and the western frontier have worked together to produce compelling stories about the nation’s past and its imagined future.

This book is a delightful and captivating portrayal of a New England farm boy who is full of love for the trees and creeks and creatures all around him. It tells of a boy living in his present while bringing his fantasized tomorrow into his today as well. This work circles John, a young farm boy growing up in 19th century New England. The author gives an account of John's experiences to show almost every boy's adventuresome, inquisitive, creative, and imaginative nature. There are references to historical or regional events and allusions to authors and their works throughout the book. This work is considered a semi-autobiographical story of Charles Dudley Warner's boyhood in 1830s rural Massachusetts. It contains events that depict the strengths of a young boy's vision and creativity while at play in nature with the wildlife. Heartwarming instants come about in telling of his immature romantic attractions, which he doesn't fully understand. This work is an exciting way to understand what a boy's childhood looked like back then.

Winner, 2022 Wrangler Award - Western Heritage Awards Winner, 2022 Spur Award - Western Writers of America "Cow Boyhood is unapologetically traditional in its valorizing of grit, stoicism and manliness." - The Wall Street Journal Thirteen-year-old Wilder has spent his boyhood watching men like his grandpa Papa Milam . . . and wanting to be like them. Now he is leaving on a two day cattle drive through river and canyon country with his aging Papa and another older man, Red Guffey. In big ranch country full of livestock and wild animals, Wilder is forced to recognize that his own instincts and abilities may have become greater than those of his heroes. ​

The third volume —the book that made Karl Ove Knausgaard a phenomenon in the United States—in the addictive New York Times bestselling series, My Struggle. A family of four—mother, father, and two boys—move to the south coast of Norway, to a new house on a newly developed site. It is the early 1970s and the family's trajectory is upwardly mobile: the future seems limitless. In painstaking, sometimes self-lacerating detail, Karl Ove Knausgaard paints a world familiar to anyone who can recall the intensity and novelty of childhood experience, one in which children and adults lead parallel lives that never meet. Perhaps the most Proustian in the series, My Struggle: Book 3 gives us Knausgaard's vivid, technicolor recollections of childhood, his emerging self-understanding, and the multilayered nature of time's passing, memory, and existence.

Before Jack London became a famous author, he was a kid growing up in Oakland and he had a best friend named Frank Irving Atherton. This book contains stories of the times they shared as children in the late 1880s into the 1890s. The two boys had some wild moneymaking schemes, survived scrapes with bullies after school, endured crazy fishing and hunting adventures and busied themselves with all kinds of exploits. But through it all, Jack always had time for books and worked to help his family. Frank was a lifelong friend of Jack's and he wanted the story of their friendship to be told. This memoir was written in the 1930s, and although it was used as a resource by Russ Kingman and Jack's daughter, Joan London, for their published works, it was never published on its own.Now, finally, Frank's manuscript has been put in book form and is available to the public. The language reflects both the era the stories took place and the time it was written. It's a journey of two boys finding their way, with Jack London's quick mind and adventurous spirit ever apparent.Come along for a glimpse into the boyhood escapades of one of America's most beloved authors never before made available for public viewing.