R.M. Ballantyne's books are exciting, knee-knocking, complete thrillers for those boys hankering for adventure stories! Those who need inspiration,too? Give them Ballantyne! Their noses will be so busy finding excitement among those wonderful pages, you'll need not worry about what mischief they might be getting into otherwise.;)
My younger brother started out reading them and after hearing him rave about them non-stop (while trying to imitate the adventures he was trying to tell me about), I myself got interested in them and decided I'd at least read one...(I picked the shortest, naturally)...Pretty soon I found myself in the same place he was and couldn't wait to get back to reading about those travels and adventures, spanning from Africa to India, Canada to the US.
Ballantye himself "was perhaps the most influential writer of boys’ literature of his generation. He was also a devout Christian of the Scottish Covenanter kind and the only outspoken advocate for Christian boyhood to have a monument paid for and dedicated in his honor by grateful children...he changed the lives of hundreds of thousands of boys for the better with his globe-trekking adventure stories that emphasized Christian character in the face of adversity." (Doug Philips, President of Vision Forum)
In his own words, he wrote to inspire boys and also to build them up to become real men - "Boys [should be] inured from childhood to trifling risks and slight dangers of every possible description, such as tumbling into ponds and off of trees, etc., in order to strengthen their nervous system.... They ought to practice leaping off heights into deep water. They ought never to hesitate to cross a stream over a narrow unsafe plank for fear of a ducking. They ought never to decline to climb up a tree, to pull fruit merely because there is a possibility of their falling off and breaking their necks. I firmly believe that boys were intended to encounter all kinds of risks, in order to prepare them to meet and grapple with risks and dangers incident to man’s career with cool, cautious self-possession.... —R.M. Ballantyne, The Gorilla Hunters
In other words, these books are treasures!
--Lydia
Hardcover, $22.00 a piece, collectors additions
