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For Boys Only: The Biggest, Baddest Book Ever

by Marc Aronson (Author)

For Boys Only: The Biggest, Baddest Book Ever
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Reading Level: 6th − 7th Grade
cms Common Sense Media Review

Hey, Boys!

Want to have some fun? Maybe learn how to land an airplane in an emergency? Or fight off an alligator? Escape from being tied up? How about taking a ride on one of America's scariest roller coasters? Learn how to make fake blood or turn a real bone into a pretzel. What if you could find out how to identify some of the world's most horrifying creatures? Or learn the secret of making a blockbuster movie? What about guessing the top 11 greatest moments in sports history? Find buried treasure? And once you've found the treasure, find out just how much it would cost you to buy one of the world's most expensive cars.

You'll find all this--and much more--over 250 pages of the biggest, baddest, and best information on just about everything. Plus we've placed a special, mind-bending, solve-the-code puzzle on random pages throughout the book that will lead you to a really cool solution! Now, that's fun!

cms Common Sense Media Review
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School Library Journal

Gr 58Aronson and Newquist add to the number of recent books targeted at boys with a pleasantly jumbled miscellanea of odd facts, sports stories, and forensic lore. There's a page of math tricks, information on how to create, or solve, a coded message, and maps that show the possible locations of hidden treasure. Plus! There are coded puzzles scattered across the bottoms of most pages, including a final "PUZZLE SUPREME." It's all appealing stuff. Unfortunately, the book falls flat when it comes to its design and illustrations. The latter are stiff, square, and about as much fun as a chart of road signs in a safety manual. One section is called "Fear Factor: America's Scariest Amusement Park Rides," but there are no pictures of any of them in action. Another is "Supercars," with descriptions of Ferraris, Lamborghinis, and other dream vehiclesbut only tiny outline drawings of them that will not satisfy boys interested in these kinds of cars. A book like this one cries out for cool photographs. Most boys will pick this book up, flip through it, and put it back down again."Walter Minkel, New York Public Library" Copyright 2008 School Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Review quotes

"How could you not love a book with monsters, treasures, disasters, tricks, weapons, and Lamborghinis—a must have book for every boy adventurer." —Jon Scieszka, author of The Stinky Cheese Man, Math Curse, Time Warp Trio, and most importantly the creator of a program called, Guys Read

"Fun . . . if there's one thing that boys like more than having stuff, it's finding out about stuff." —Mike Lupica, author of Travel Team, Heat, and Summer Ball

"Filled with facts, puzzles, stats, stories and more, For Boys Only: The Biggest, Baddest Book Ever by Marc Aronson and HP Newquist offers up information on favorite subjects . . . Printed with black and red text and illustrated throughout, this graphically fresh and topically diverse collection should capture the imagination of its target audience." —Publishers Weekly

"Kids who read For Boys Only won't realize it, but this treasure trove of information is a tribute to the joys of research. Like The Dangerous Book for Boys, this contains several how-to articles; unlike that best seller, it doesn't limit itself so narrowly in scope. That certainly helps it earn the 'baddest' of its subtitle . . . Designed with cool icons and laid out with an aim to be friendly for Internet-savvy eyes, For Boys Only is the book to get the 'XY-chromosomer' on your gift list. Get one for yourself, too, because you'll learn a lot from it, as well." —Oklahoma Gazette

"In a tone both light and humorous, Newquist and Aronson aim to please by assembling a tantalizing assortment of codes, puzzles, best lists, brief history and science facts, instructions for fake blood and the ultimate Frisbee, and even advice about facing up to a shark ("try not to bleed too much") . . . this offers lots of good fun, and with so much chick lit available, it's nice to see special attention being paid to boys. In fact, there's nothing here to keep girls away but the title." —Booklist

"Marc Aronson and HP Newquist's For Boys Only: The Biggest, Baddest Book Ever, may be an even cooler treasure trove of knowledge—both useful and arcane—than the runaway hit The Dangerous Book for Boys. It downplays the studied nostalgia for a more Internet-savvy, here-and-now approach. With a cool, icon-driven design, its scattered, uncategorized contents touch on everything from great moments in video games to how to best survive a shark attack." —Bookgasm (blog)

"This book was awesome and filled with amazing facts. I mean who knew that there was a wave of molasses 10 feet high! This book has neat info for everyone!" —Walker Downs, 12 years old

Marc Aronson
Marc Aronson is the acclaimed author of Trapped: How the World Rescued 33 Miners from 2,000 Feet Below the Chilean Desert, which earned four starred reviews. He is also the author of Rising Water: The Story of the Thai Cave Rescue and Sir Walter Ralegh and the Quest for El Dorado, winner of the ALA's first Robert F. Sibert Award for nonfiction and the Boston Globe-Horn Book Award. He has won the LMP award for editing and has a PhD in American history from New York University. Marc is a member of the full-time faculty in the graduate program of the Rutgers School of Communication and Information. He lives in Maplewood, New Jersey, with his wife, Marina Budhos, and sons. You can visit him online at MarcAronson.com.

Paul Freedman is a history professor at Yale University and the author of American Cuisine: And How it Got This Way, Ten Restaurants that Changed America, and Out of the East: Spices and the Medieval Imagination. He is also the editor of Food: The History of Taste.

Dr. Frederick Douglass Opie is a professor of history and foodways at Babson College, where he teaches courses such as "African American History and Foodways" and "Food and Civil Rights." The author of Hog and Hominy: Soul Food from Africa to America, he also hosts a food history blog.

Amanda Palacios has a master's degree in anthropology with a minor in food studies and a graduate certificate in public health from New Mexico State University. She plans to do work on addressing health issues and food access in the border region.

Tatum Willis is an enrolled member of the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation (CTUIR) and descends from the Yakama, Nez Perce, and Oglala Lakota peoples. A graduate of Yale University, she is currently a managing director of Cayuse Mission Solutions, part of the Cayuse family of companies.

David Zheng is an artist and filmmaker. After growing up in China, he immigrated to South Carolina and later attended Yale University. His passion for cooking got him started in food history, and he is especially interested in the history of Chinese cuisine.

Toni D. Chambers earned her BFA in illustration at the University of Massachusetts. Born to Jamaican immigrant parents, Toni has always had family, culture, and the arts as prominent inspiring forces in her life.
Classification
Fiction
ISBN-13
9780312377069
Lexile Measure
-
Guided Reading Level
-
Publisher
Feiwel & Friends
Publication date
November 20, 2007
Series
-
BISAC categories
JUV005000 - Juvenile Fiction | Boys & Men
Library of Congress categories
Boys
Curiosities and wonders
Recreation
Handbooks, vade-mecums, etc

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