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Radio Boys Cronies Or, Bill Brown's Radio
This book was converted from its physical edition to the digital format by a community of volunteers. You may find it for free on the web. Purchase of the Kindle edition includes wireless delivery.
- GenresFiction
122 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 1, 1922
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
June 7, 2011
Hello and welcome to another installment of my Project Gutenberg project in which I intend to read in alphabetical order all of the books in public domain and I also plan to live forever in order to complete this task.
Currently I am on my way to become an expert in 19th and early 20th century children and YA fiction. I am also very proud to be the only person in the whole wide Internet to provide reviews for those books.
This one was about boys and girls who listen to lectures about Edison, which excite them so much that in an engineering frenzy they build a dam, small power plant and a radio.
What is really interesting about this book published originally in 1922 is how gender PC it is. Boys and girls set out to build a radio and both teams succeed. Girls discuss with and challenge boys and often win. I would like contemporary authors to take note because I often find that girls in current YA fiction are only interested in things that glitter and they are idiotically helpless.
The book also tells the story of Edison but if you want to learn about Edison, I am quite sure there are better sources out there.
Other than that, the book doesn’t have any significant literary value. It's a little moralistic and there was an absolutely ridiculous comic relief in form of a fat girl Skeets, who appeared in the narrative only to fall or to knock down and break something. She must’ve done that about fifty times in this little book and it was neither funny nor fitting with the story.
All in all – an old, not exceptionally well written book that is not sexist and almost not racist.
Stay tuned as my next read is "With The Turks in Palestine" by Alexander Aaronsohn and I have a very good feeling about it.
Currently I am on my way to become an expert in 19th and early 20th century children and YA fiction. I am also very proud to be the only person in the whole wide Internet to provide reviews for those books.
This one was about boys and girls who listen to lectures about Edison, which excite them so much that in an engineering frenzy they build a dam, small power plant and a radio.
What is really interesting about this book published originally in 1922 is how gender PC it is. Boys and girls set out to build a radio and both teams succeed. Girls discuss with and challenge boys and often win. I would like contemporary authors to take note because I often find that girls in current YA fiction are only interested in things that glitter and they are idiotically helpless.
The book also tells the story of Edison but if you want to learn about Edison, I am quite sure there are better sources out there.
Other than that, the book doesn’t have any significant literary value. It's a little moralistic and there was an absolutely ridiculous comic relief in form of a fat girl Skeets, who appeared in the narrative only to fall or to knock down and break something. She must’ve done that about fifty times in this little book and it was neither funny nor fitting with the story.
All in all – an old, not exceptionally well written book that is not sexist and almost not racist.
Stay tuned as my next read is "With The Turks in Palestine" by Alexander Aaronsohn and I have a very good feeling about it.
May 11, 2022
Vintage juvenile fiction from 1913, young people make good through pluck and luck, radio was a new fangled novelty, and regular broadcasting was years away. Bill Brown, the teenage title character and his school chums accept a job to build a small hydro electric plant, including the dam, on the estate of a well to do local resident. They later build a radio receiver from scratch, making the cabinet and building most of the components by hand. I expect most modern teens would have neither the skill nor the ambition to take on projects like this.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews