Dan's Papers -November 6, 2009

When Richard Wiese was 11 years old, his father (the first person to solo the Pacific in an airplane) took him on a little adventure: climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro in Tanzania.

Wiese followed in his father's exploring footsteps on a life of adventure. He has cross-country skied to the North Pole, discovered 29 new life forms in a Kilimanjaro crater and put satellite collars on jaguars in the Yucatan. In 2002 he became the youngest president of the 100-year-old Explorers Club. He hosted the TV series, "Exploration with Richard Wiese," and recently shot a series called "Hell on Earth" in Ethiopia with the BBC and Discover Channel.

Last spring, HarperCollins released Wiese's book, Born to Explore; How to be a Backyard Adventurer, designed to motivate kids and the adults who love them to venture into the great outdoors, near and far. A year before that, a popular boy's book for Christmas was The Dangerous Book for Boys, which taught things like how to tie knots, palm a coin, tan a skin and wrap a package in brown paper and string. The concept was quickly duplicated by another author with The Daring Book for Girls.

Wiese's efforts are more focused, yet he has a grander mission: to get kids off the couch and out from in front of TVs and gaming stations. He realized the need for the book when he took 70 high school students to Antarctica. At one point, the ship came upon a pod of about 50 whales. About a dozen kids never looked at up from their Gameboys. So Wiese wrote the book in hopes of getting kids and teens interested in the real world.

It's a very cool book, and while some chapters ("Chopping Down a Tree," "Building a Canoe," "Building a Foxhole Radio"), are advanced, others ("How Not to be a Victim of Insects," "Avoid Becoming Wildlife Food") are incredibly important for kids of all ages. While the latter addresses predators like bears, alligators and mountain lions, there's also a page on dogs.

Other chapters cover adventure skills like making a compass, learning to track animals and how to build hammocks and igloos. (I tried the latter with my son last winter after a big snow. We would've greatly benefited from these pages.) There's a chapter on reading the weather through old adages ("Red sky at night..."), and by observing the behavior of worms, ants and dogs.

The chapter on eating in the wild has pretty tame suggestions (PB&J sandwiches), but there was a very interesting section on baking and roasting in paper bags that might have been lifted from The Silver Palette Cookbook. Imagine en papillote al fresco.

Born to Explore is like a modern Boy Scout Handbook without the moralistic overtones. Even though my son is young, we could have a lot of fun with this. Although Dangerous had one of the all-time greatest book titles, the concept wasn't quite borne out with the content. Also, Born to Explore isn't gender specific like the boys/girls volumes that seem like a bit of a throwback these days.

Nonetheless, all these books have their merits: they teach tweens and teens how to be prepared for all sorts of situations that don't involve handheld digital devices.

About 10 years ago, working as an editorial director at an interactive agency in the city, I headed up two enormous content-heavy websites for tween and teen girls called "Being Girl," sponsored by Procter and Gamble. Yes, there was a lot of content about periods and Tampax, but 80% of the site was advice on everything from BF issues to anorexia to addiction to dating, and on the older girls' site, drugs and sex (yes, we actually got P&G to agree that a site for teenage girls that didn't address sex might as well be a homepage with a giant "L" its forehead).

Anyway, I spun the idea into a book called Getting it Right the First Time, because I realized after many focus groups, much research and a bit of soul searching, that's really what adolescents and teens care about. And looking and being cool arise from knowing what to do at any given moment-whether it's coming face to face with the person who stood you up the night before, or a real snake in the grass.