When I was shopping for birthday presents for my son recently, I walked through the book department at a store, sort of half-browsing. He’s only two, and he really doesn’t like books yet. He’ll sit with me reading to him for about half a story, and then he wants to go run throw Legos into the fan or crash Hot Wheels cars together or something else equally insane. Watching him play, I am struck by just how great that time in your life is, how exciting it is to just indulge imagination with boundless energy, and I can’t help but flash back to my own childhood. I think that’s part of the charge of parenthood... getting a taste of that freedom straight from the tap again. He’s a rough and tumble little monkey, and I love that he’s still at the start of his education, each new fact or idea like a piece of gold that he tucks away until he can use it.

There was one book, though, that made me stop. The title just jumped out at me. THE DANGEROUS BOOK FOR BOYS. It was published in the US at the start of May, and actually was out in the UK last year, but until I saw it in the store, I hadn’t heard anything about it. When I picked it up and started flipping through it, I experienced one of those moments of instant love. You know what I’m talking about... when you find something that you didn’t know existed, and as soon as you find it, you realize there was a hole in your life, and this is exactly what you needed to fill it. I’m not sure how we’ve managed to survive without a book like this so far, so I am indebted to Conn and Hal Iggulden, the brothers who wrote the book. I didn’t buy it for Toshi yet. Right now, I’m just reading my own copy of it, and when it’s time, he’ll get one of his very own, and I will encourage him to explore its pages without restriction.

Basically, it’s a primer on everything you could ever need to know to be a boy. Written in a sort of deliberately old-fashioned prose, like the Boy Scout handbook you wish they’d had the balls to print, this is like a small encyclopedia of...

Here. Instead of me trying to explain it, check this out:

There’s a simple, quiet genius to the whole thing. It never makes a joke out of what it’s explaining, and it doesn’t try to make it “cool” or “hip” or “extreme,” or whatever other douchebag buzzword you want to use. Instead, it simply extols the virtues of play and danger and being outside and learning and imagination. It is a celebration of childhood, as well as a “how-to” book in an age where we seem determined to legislate all the fun out of everything. Kids today are growing up with these Nintendo sixpacks, all doughy and soft and technologically pampered, and this book exists almost as a dare to them to get off the goddamn couch and do something real.

And now, Disney and Scott Rudin have announced a plan to turn the book into a film. Somehow.

There are no writers or director attached yet, and I’m not even sure there’s a plan for how to do it. I can think of a dozen ways to try and incorporate all of this into a movie, and I hope Rudin finds just the right person to do this. I hope the movie taps that same wellspring of emotion that exists between fathers and their boys that the book does so completely.

And I really hope my boy loves this book when he reads it eventually.

And I hope to God he’ll let me enjoy it with him.

Drew McWeeny, Los Angeles