On My Honor: Boy Scouts and the Making of American Youth. By Jay Mechling. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001. xxvi, 323 pp. $30.00, ISBN 0-226-51704-7.)

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Jay Mechling's book is an ethnographic study of Boy Scout culture, based on extensive fieldwork with one California Boy Scout troop over a period of fifteen years. The chapters are organized around a period of fourteen days—the average length of a Boy Scout summer camp. Each chapter narrates the events of one to two days, condensed out of the years of fieldwork. Accordingly, the characters, events, and dialogues are composites too. There are two significant caveats, however, that Mechling is very up front about: first, due to its methodology, organization, and goals, it is not a work of history. Second, the study is very much informed by Mechling's own scouting experience and his “proud identity as an Eagle Scout” (p. xxi), the highest rank a Boy Scout can earn. Written for a general audience, Mechling's book seeks to contribute to contemporary debates about the socialization of boys, adolescence, and masculinity in U.S. society. Mechling finds that the current debate over boys and manliness bears considerable similarity to the late-nineteenth-century debate over a “crisis of masculinity.” Founded in 1910, the Boy Scouts of America (bsa) were meant as a response to that turn-of-the-century crisis of masculinity. By the 1990s, however, the BSA national offices had become the defendant in several high-level lawsuits over the organization's exclusionary policies toward gays, girls, and atheists. Mechling is highly critical of the policies and rhetoric of the BSA national offices, which tightly interweave religion, heterosexual masculinity, and citizenship to such an extent that one has become virtually unthinkable without the others.