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Download this text: Penrod
Customer Review: penrod
I thought that Penrod was a extremely funny story about a boy in the the early 1900's. It was a great story about a 12 year old boy named penrod along with his faithful companion duke and his friends Sam,Verman, and Herman. The gang was always clashing with adults and teacherS making it a humurous story about young boys getting into mischief. Its an amazing story that yound adults can relate to as well as adults in their past experiences in their school days. It almost feels as if ur part of the group and your right along with them starting trouble. From anything to skipping a pageant to dipping a girls hair in ink. Its an amazing story about teenagers living an average life in an urban city living and coping with everyday problems.
Customer Review: Penrod: Still a Classic
After all these years, it was a treat to read a chapter or two of "Penrod" taking me back to a much simpler time. Penrod and Sam were the Harry Potter and friends of a much earlier era, and they are just as entertaining in 2008 as they were 70 years ago. This book was purchased for a younger friend who had never had the opportunity to enjoy the antics and adventures of these delightful boys.
Customer Review: Tom Sawyer Meets Monty Python
Penrod Schofield has enough good intentions to pave a Super Highway straight to Hell, but his ways and works are encompassed all about with temptations too powerful to ignore. The hapless Penrod is one of the funniest characters American literature produced, and it's a damn shame that he has been allowed to languish for so long in darkness.
It is unfortunate, but America has been muzzled by the forces of Political Correctness, which may be why this book has been swept under the carpet for so long. For Boothe Tarkington wasn't at all acceptable by the standards of our modern self appointed High Priests of PC. But hey, that's all the more reason you should read this hilarious story! Go on, buy this book and defy the Thought Police to tell you what you are and are not allowed to laugh about anymore! We used to have Free Speech, you know, before we were Balkanized by people determined to find something to be offended over at any (ahem!) niggling cost. Wouldn't it be great if we all relaxed and agreed to try that experiment again?
Customer Review: Beautiful Tale of a Faulty but Admirable Boy
In the days before a book like "Penrod" would be frowned upon by the mainstream media and stand almost no chance of getting published, there lived a man named Booth Tarkington. He was a wise observer of human nature who mastered the psychology of human interactions, especially those pertaining to pre-adolescent boys.
Yes, Tarkington knew boys. He knew how they acted, why they acted, what they wanted, what they feared, and he wrote a series of books using this knowledge--"Penrod," "Penrod and Sam," and "Penrod Jashber," all centering around the misadventures of an exuberant, character-filled, eleven-year old named, you guessed it, Penrod Schofield.
With the lyricism and observational skills of a poet, Booth Tarkington chronicles carefree days in the young life of Penrod with innocent beauty. He takes us on a joyful romp through a boy's life in a time when boys were much freer to be just that--boys. Akin to Mark Twain's (in)famous Tom Sawyer, Penrod is a rascal, a rapscallion, getting into constant trouble at school, with his family, and with neighborhood boys, yet he is also a clever and creative young lad whom the confines of school and family and boring routine just cannot keep dormant. He is constantly coming up with new ideas that adults just shake their heads at but his fellow exuberant boys understand. And he's a romantic; he is unabashedly in love with the beautiful Marjorie Jones, and their turbulent attraction is a witty embodiment of the immortal bad boy-good girl romance. Penrod is the essence of boyhood.
Booth Tarkington's "Penrod" is absolutely alive with nothing but pure spirit, almost as much as the boy himself. Today spirit like that would be misunderstood in young males and stifled by the world at large, but as for this beautiful work by Booth Tarkington, it will always be just Penrod, his dog, and his friend Sam, living life day by day in a simpler America.
Product Description
Penrod sat morosely upon the back fence and gazed with envy at Duke, his wistful dog. A bitter soul dominated the various curved and angular surfaces known by a careless world as the face of Penrod Schofield. Except in solitude, that face was almost always cryptic and emotionless; for Penrod had come into his twelfth year wearing an expression carefully trained to be inscrutable. Since the world was sure to misunderstand everything, mere defensive instinct prompted him to give it as little as possible to lay hold upon. Nothing is more impenetrable than the face of a boy who has learned this, and Penrod's was habitually as fathomless as the depth of his hatred this morning for the literary activities of Mrs. Lora Rewbush-an almost universally respected fellow citizen, a lady of charitable and poetic inclinations, and one of his own mother's most intimate friends.
Customer Review: Humorous Portrait of Years Past - Tainted by Casual, Offhand Racial Remarks
Booth Tarkington's humorous tales of 12-year old Penrod Schofield compare favorably with Mark Twain's novels Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn and Rudyard Kipling's Starky and Friends. The immensely popular Penrod (1914) was followed by Penrod and Sam (1916) and Penrod Jashber (1929).
Unfortunately, some of Tarkington's tales of young Penrod reflect the commonplace racial prejudice of early twentieth century America. This prejudice is not mean-spirited nor vicious, but nonetheless some stories may be unsettling to today's readers. Racial prejudice is not front and center, but is simply part of the background. Racial comments are made in a casual, off-handed, unconscious fashion.
Penrod Schofield is a typical boy. He has little interest in being a perfect young gentleman (and in fact considers the term somewhat pejorative). He is not bad boy by any means, but he does seem to be continually in trouble. He is embarrassed by his forced participation in school plays and dance classes, and always seems to offend the only girl for whom he has some liking.
At one point Penrod quickly makes friends with two young black boys, Herman and Verman, and persuades them to participate in an exhibition as Herman the one-fingered tatood wild man and Verman the savage tatood wild boy who talks only in his native languages. Their small earnings from their amateur carnival are shared fairly. Penrod is particularly impressed that their father was in jail: "Pappy cut a man, an' de police done kep' him in jail sense Chris'mus-time; but dey goin' tuhn him loose ag'in nex' week."
A later chapter in which Herman and Verman save Penrod from a white bully is titled Coloured Troops in Action. The reader recognizes that Penrod's occasional expressions like darky boy (and other more objectionable terms) are never intentionally offensive, but are simply common speech (and hence reflections of a pervasive, socially acceptable prejudice, not a personal prejudice on Penrod's part.)
Nonetheless, Tarkington's Penrod tales are not likely to be found in classrooms today. Rightly or wrongly, later generations (and certainly recent generations) hold earlier generations to new standards. There is much to be said for and against political correctness, but it is a shame when earlier literature is ignored (a prejudicial censorship?) for modern sins.
Penrod provides a fascinating insight into how completely racial prejudice permeated American society in the early twentieth century. A creative high school history teacher might use Penrod as an illustration that societal norms do change in relatively short periods. In any event I recommend Penrod to any reader with a little tolerance for past prejudices and past intolerances.
Booth Tarkington is a lesser known author today, although other than William Faulkner, he is the only author to have been awarded the Pulitzer Prize in fiction twice - The Magnificent Ambersons (1918) and Alice Adams (1921).
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