Book Review: The Double Dangerous Book for Boys

Alpha Omega Family Adventures received a review copy from HarperCollins Publishers and voluntarily provided an honest review. This does not affect the opinion of the book or the content of the review. All opinions are our own.

As soon as The Double Dangerous Book for Boys arrived in the mail, Aiden (our oldest) was completely lost in the book figuring out what he wanted to try out first! I’ll be honest, we haven’t read the first Dangerous Book for Boys, but after reading this one I am sure the first book will be under our tree this Christmas! This first edition sold over a million copies!

Let me start out by saying this book is impressive! It has a very nice, thick hard cover. It is very well made and seems like it will endure any hardships my boys place on it. This book is written by Conn Iggulden with the help of his sons Arthur and Cameron. One of his boys is the same age as my oldest, Aiden! It is designed for boys ages eight-eighty!

Not only does this book include more than seventy chapters with important skills for boys to learn and know, but it also includes chapters on historical information and essential stories such as Forgotten Explorers. There are enough interesting chapters to read to catch any boy’s attention! This book includes chapters on chess openings, writing speeches, writing thank you letters, and making a pencil catapult along with a ton of other interesting topics. The images and instructions that are included with each chapter are very detailed and easy to follow as well.

I asked Aiden what were the first couple of chapters in the book that caught his attention and his list was longer than his paper! But, the first four chapters that interested Aiden the most were 1. Picking locks 2. Solving a Rubik’s Cube 3. Elastic Band Gun and 4. Making a Stink Bomb!

After reading this introduction to the author, I really felt like our family could connect to this book. I myself love being outdoors and with us having four boys who also love being outdoors it seemed like this book was written just for our family! Conn Iggulden, he says,

“In 2006, there didn’t seem to be many books of the kind I used to love. I wanted adventures, catapults, crystals, knowledge, history, and craftsmanship. I wanted to read dozens of chapters, each different from the last. In short, I wanted a book I could hide in a treehouse-after I’d used it to build one. With my brother Harry, I worked for six months in a shed and wrote chapters on all the things that interested us-from cloud formations and astronomy, to juggling and tripwires. When it was finished, we sent it to the publishers. We didn’t set out to write a bestseller. We just wanted to celebrate the wonderful, daft ideas of boyhood-when all doors are open, the future is unwritten and summers seem to last a really long time.

I wrote this one with my two sons. One has become a young man since the original Dangerous Book came out. The other has reached the age of ten. He runs around like Huckleberry Finn and should wear shoes more often, probably. I thought for a while that I’d covered everything in the first book, but there’s nothing like raising boys for surprising you.

Twelve years have passed since I first roughed out a chapter on conkers for a publisher. I wrote then, “In this age of video games and mobile phones, there must still be a place for knots, treehouses and stories of incredible courage.” That’s just as important today-though how we missed picking a lock, making an elastic-band gun and learning sign language, I’ll never know. In the intervening years, I wrote down a good idea whenever I heard one. Perhaps I always knew I’d go back and do another book. These are all new chapters, from casting things in resin, doing table tricks, and wiring a lamp, to learning strength exercises, the twelve Caesars, stress balls, and ancient ruins. There is also a design for a paper airplane-and, yes, it’s even better than the last one. The world is full of fascinating things. You’ll see.

-Conn Iggulden

The book goes on sale October 8, 2019, so grab your copy today! It is a perfect Christmas gift as well!