Boys behaving Badly!

At the heart of this book is a simple, humane message: youth can be blissful and it can be nightmarish, but if you are considerate to people, sensibly hedonistic about sex, drink moderately, talk about your anxieties, and turn your back on violence, illegal drugs and tobacco, you will probably be okay. This message is expressed clearly and good- humouredly, but it is almost buried under a torrential vomiturition of graffiti, leering marginalia, scrawls, smears, witless banter and typographical fly shit. I assume that this has been done to validate the '100% bloke approved' label on the front cover, but the 'blokes' I spoke to about this did not consider it necessary. Also on the front cover, the mock original title, 'Young Gentleman's Handbook', has been struck out and the present title scrawled underneath. This is ironic, since the core text does indeed provide sensible advice on how to become a gentle man, but I do not suppose the publishers would allow the author to get away with expressing an objective as nerdish as that.