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Boy : Tales of Childhood
by Roald Dahl
Product Group: Book
Publisher: Topeka Bindery (1999-10)
ISBN: 080857275X
EAN: 9780808572756
Dewy Decimal #: 823.914
School & Library Binding
Reading Level: Ages 9-12
SKU: FL0232
Condition: Good
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Editorial Reviews
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Product Description
"An autobiography is a book a person writes about his own life and it is usually full of all sorts of boring details. This is not an autobiography. I would never write a history of myself. On the other hand, throughout my young days at school and just afterwards a number of things happened to me that I have never forgotten." -- Roald Dahl As full of excitement and the unexpected as his world-famous, bestselling books, Roald Dahl's tales of his own childhood are completely fascinating and fiendishly funny. Did you know that Roald Dahl nearly lost his nose in a car accident? Have you heard about his involvement in the Great Mouse Plot of 1924? If not, you don't yet know all there is to know about Roald Dahl. Sure to captivate and delight you, the boyhood antics of this master storyteller are not to be missed! Performed by Derek Jacobi
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Customer Reviews
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Hilarious Book
Rating  (5)
Date: 2009-01-03
Boy by Roald Dahl is an amazing book. It is one of the most hilarious books I have ever read. Some of the things that happened to him seemed pretty painful like getting his nose cut almost completely off. My favorite part of the book is when Roald Dahl and his friends put a dead mouse in the gobstopper jar in a candy store so that when the shopkeeper put her dirty fingers in the jar she would grab the mouse and not the gobstoppers.
Also reading this book I found out that Roald Dahl based some of his books on his childhood like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. He wrote it about how he and his friends loved candy so much, but they had barely any money to buy it. It would have been awesome to have candy for a penny or two pennies and it sounded like they had some good candy.
Well, anyway I absolutely loved this book and would recommend it for readers of all ages.
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Delightful, dark - and thoroughly enjoyable
Rating (5)
Date: 2008-12-15
I have never read any of Roald Dahl's children's stories, but have always wanted to. His first memoir, BOY, is a very slight volume, less than 200 pages, but it is full of perhaps the most delightful and whimsical vignettes of childhood ever penned. While it is true there are some very shocking references to beatings and "canings" which were apparently quite common in English public schools, administered by both the masters and the older boys, the overall tone of the book is one of wonder and fond reminiscing. This is particularly true when Dahl talks of his home life, which was obviously a very loving albeit often unsupervised time, when boys could just be boys. Dahl's father, a very successful businessman, died when Roald was very young, but his mother, a Norwegian immigrant, kept her large blended family (6 children in all) very well, and stayed in Wales (then England) to raise them all, as her husband would have wanted her to. What I found most interesting in the book (although it was ALL absolutely wonderful) were the stories of young Roald's experiences at various boarding schools. These things happened back in the 20s, and yet many of these tales were so much like my own stories from one year in a Catholic seminary (a boarding school) that I was astounded. For example, when he explains "Prep," which was the same as what we called evening "study hall" at St Joe's in the late 50s.
"Every weekday evening the whole school would sit for one hour in the Main Hall, between six and seven o'clock, to do Prep. The Master on duty for the week would be in charge of Prep, which meant that he sat high up on a dais at the top end of the hall and kept order ... The rules of Prep were simple but strict. You were forbidden to look up from your work, and you were forbidden to talk ..."
This simple descriptive passage took me immediatley back to St Joe's Seminary in Grand Rapids when I was just 13 or so, and sat at my study hall desk right next to my friend Tom Cassleman. We often skirted these strict rules by raising the tops of our desks, ostensibly to get a book or pen, so we could whisper to each other or pass notes, smirking and huffing silently to each other, immensely pleased with ourselves at fooling the priest "master" up on the dais in the center of the hall. Ah, yes, Mr Dahl got it right, even though he himself was a fearful little boy of only nine in his tale, which took place in an English school over thirty years before. I could relate, as could any St Joe's student from those years in the 1950s. As for the canings, they were gone by the 50s in American schools, but we could be sent to see the dreaded Dean of Discipline, Fr Leo, if we were caught for any infractions of the rules. And I did hear rumors of a certain perhaps predatory short Monsignor who invited the smaller boys into his rooms to "counsel" them. Thankfully, since I was already over six feet tall, I never got the call. Another passage in Dahl's story which I immediately felt a kinship with was the one where he talked of the propensity of doctors and dentists in his day who never bothered with anesthetic when operating on children.
"Pain was something we were expected to endure. Anaesthetics and pain-killing injections were not much used in those days. Dentists, in particular, never bothered with them ..."
Yup, I had an old-school dentist, even in the 50s, who didn't believe in "wasting" novocaine on kids. The prevailing theory was that kids didn't really feel pain. I remember crying every time I got a filling, and I got a lot of them back in those pre-fluoride days. Dr Brown would frown and tell me to "stop being such a baby." Bastard! Once again, Dahl understood and got it right. If it isn't obvious yet, I loved this book. On to its sequel now, GOING SOLO. Watch for my review of that soon. - Tim Bazzett, author of the Reed City Boy trilogy.
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Pass the Cadbury's Dairy Milk Chocolate bar, please!
Rating (5)
Date: 2008-12-01
1 out of 1 customers found this reveiw helpful
BOY: TALES OF CHILDHOOD was a thoroughly enjoyable autobiography about the early years of British author Roald Dahl. I used to wonder how he came by such an unusual first name until I read that his family originally came from Norway. All of that and more is written in this small book, and some 81 five star reviews preceding mine attest to how truly entertaining it really is. Of particular interest to me were his years in several Public Schools (We here in the US know them as Private or Prep Schools.) where he excelled in sports and suffered, at times, the bullying and corporal punishment that was mercilessly doled out to young boys by sadistic Head Masters and Upper Grade Students alike.
Dahl's book is divided into four parts: 1. Starting-point (His "Papa and Mama" and kindergarten 1922-3), 2. Llandaff Cathedral School (1923-5), 3. St Peter's School (1925-9), and 4. Repton School and Shell Oil Company (1929-36). So, the book covers the years from his birth in 1916 to his graduation from Repton School and employment with the Shell Oil Company in Africa prior to the beginning of WW2. It concludes with Roald joining the RAF in 1939 to train as a fighter pilot. Dahl continued his autobiographical adventures during the war in a follow-up book entitled GOING SOLO.
Although Roald Dahl passed away in 1990, his books are still very popular with children and adults of all ages. I highly recommend this wonderful book...and everything else this incredibly talented man has ever written.
P.S. Many family photos, bits and pieces from hand-written letters by the author, and amusing pen and ink drawings by British artist Quentin Blake are included.
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Roald Dahl's life
Rating (5)
Date: 2008-11-30
My twin eight year old sons are just loving all the Roald Dahl books. This one in particular fascinates them as it is the story of his own life.
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I've lost track of how often I've read this book
Rating (5)
Date: 2008-11-22
2 out of 2 customers found this reveiw helpful
I adore reading and devour about 3-4 books a month, and I can safely say this is my favorite book of all time. I first read Boy when I was around 8. Now, nearly twenty years later, I still have that same copy. The cover is hanging on by a thread and the binding is in sad shape, but it sums up how I feel about the book: I have read it to death. No one tells a story or turns a phrase quite like Dahl. His descriptions of homemade Norwegian ice cream alone make the book worth reading! While not recommended for very young children due to some disturbing images (corporal punishment at school, a scary trip to the dentist), anyone who loves vivid, memorable, hilarious memoirs should read this book...over and over again!
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