21 STARS REVIEW
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PJ Nights
THE ENTERPRISE BOOKS
Captivating Stories for Boys by Justly Popular Writers.

They pluck lessons
the
       graphic character conveys perseverance manly
          —and to honorable pluck,
       the tendency of formation of perseverance
          and formation are pluck, manly manly—
        perseverance of independence.

~12mo. Illustrated. Attractively bound in cloth ~

Author's comment: When I was young, one of my favorite things to do was rummage through my grandfather's attic. In it, I discovered books from his childhood. Reading them was a thrill—I was experiencing something he had as well and this was a connection albeit one that was not contemporaneous. Books for boys and girls in the early 1900's were very different, I found, from advertisements for story series for both sexes in the backs of his books. Boys were “manly” and “plucky” and girls were “good”, “sweet” and “obedient”. These poems are cut-ups of descriptions from a series of boys' books. I typed the exact words into a word processor and then moved them around and repeated them by copying and pasting with an ear for sound and a eye for an exaggeration of what struck me as the biggest incongruities between the past and present ideas of what boys should be and what makes them heroic.

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