better book title would be "Camp Northeast US" | Camp Camp: Where Fantasy Island Meets Lord of the Flies |...

Best job I've ever had. | Camp Camp: Where Fantasy Island Meets Lord of the Flies | Roger Bennett, Jules Shell

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	• Camp Camp: Where Fantasy Island Meets Lord of the Flies Roger Bennett, Jules Shell Crown, 2008 - 304 pages average customer review:based on 9 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Dodgeball and camp

"Camp Camp" is the ultimate camp book. As soon as you open up this book you are instantly brought back onto that yellow school bus as it passes under the large wooden, "Welcome to Camp" sign and you pull onto the bunk line. Those were the days where your counselors could act as goofy and foolish as they wanted and yet they were the coolest and biggest people on the planet. You could be the hero of the day because you won dodgeball for your team against the older kids and earned the nickname of, "Dodge" for the rest of the summer...only at camp!

I am a serial camper, having attended and worked at several camps mentioned in the book: Camp Danbee (www.campdanbee.com) , Mah-Kee-Nac, Winadu, Ramaquois, Winaukee, and Cobbossee. It was an instant pleasure to read excerpts given by campers from my former camps. This book reminded me of how much camp becomes a part of who you are and how much you miss it when you have left.

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better book title would be "Camp Northeast US"

I guess you could argue that some experiences are universal, and that covering one slice of the camp life covers them all. Maybe so. But this book is really about kids (primarily Jewish) living/camping in the Northeast United States. So the stories of the kids who were considered klutzes back in their own school but sports superstars at camp, for example, just may not resonate with everyone. The book is enjoyable to read, but it seems to leave out more than it covers. There are many types of camps, regions of the country, etc. but this book leaves many of them out.

In sum it is a interesting book to flip thru, but might primarily appeal to a narrow audience and not the general public the way the newspaper reviews I read (that prompted me to buy it) imply. Had I known their previous book was "Bar Mitzvah Disco" I would have been prepared for a book predominantly about one segment of the population.

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Best job I've ever had.

I've had the life lesson of being a camp counselor the year we landed on the moon. I was 18 and frankly didn't know what I was doing there. Soon it became a whole different world. The boys stayed with us for at least a week at a time in an isolated canyon north of Los Angeles. It wasn't just 'Lord of the Flies', but a bizarre comedy of naivete, wonder, longing, petty fights, and a situation where the loonies were definitely running the asylum.

Looking through this book everything that happened so long ago popped back into my head as if it were recent memory.

We had our cook, who smoked while stirring the huge pots of something. He was rumored to be a cop killer. His assistant looked like a Hells Angel, but much dirtier. They retained their jobs despite the random cases of food poisoning. Perhaps it was our abject fear of them.

The mid-summer septic tank "explosion". It forced the closure of 2 cabins and the double bunking of kids. Madness. The 'creek' flowed for the rest of the Summer. It may have been Mother Earth recoiling from our behavior.

The midnight swims after the campers were sound asleep, the stunning nights under the stars, being outdoors for 3 months. No TV, no iPods, no Walkmans, just the rare radio. Ahh.

Rumors kept us busier than middle-school girls. The whispers of trysts and the obvious romances, the commando raids into the kitchen to steal cigarettes, the cook and his mate teaching me the fine art of Bourbon drinking. That did wonders for my street cred. And, of course, the pranks pulled not on the campers but on each other.

Then came our education on the variety of backgrounds, characters, and families of our boys. All were under-privileged, most from broken homes, some with psychological deficits, that just baffled us, and the rest just dirt poor. One of my charges was a black youth from South East L.A. He couldn't read. So I would read letters that his mama wrote to him. I totally lost it when she taped a dime to one of her letters so that he had something to spend.

The saddest part was when the boys went home. I had the 12 & 13 year olds. It never failed, they all were bawling as they left. A surprising few continued to write letters to me for years.

This book's subtitle should have been the title, small quibble. I say this because the stunts we pulled or hazing that was inflicted, seemed to us unique. Now I learn they are universal. Oh man, the pranks. It is a wonder no one was seriously injured. One such activity was to raid the archery locker and shoot arrows at each other. Real arrows, real people targets. Wish I owned a camera back then. Better yet this book makes me wish that I had been a camper. Excellent book, die-laughing photos, and a great experience. Enjoy.

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Relive your camp days

"Camp Camp" pulls you back to your beloved camp days where your biggest worries involved looking good for canteen and the dance, waking up for morning line-up, and passing the deep water test.

A former camper can flip open to any page, read any passage and look at any grainy old Kodak photo and relate completely. If you missed out on attending summer camp, than this book will make you wish you had gone and had a story about making a slip n' slide on the bunk floor with your bunk 27 buddies using your counselor's shaving cream, body soap, and shampoo. As the saying goes, "A picture says a thousand words." Well, a camp photo is worth ten thousand and can also evoke tears, laughter and a host of other emotions.

Clearly, I am what many would call a, "camp person," having attended and worked at Camp Echo Lake for summers. Like another reviewer, my biggest disappointment with this book was the lack of my own camp's passage or photos; however I was extremely excited to read about the camp where I currently work, Camp Mah-Kee-Nac, http://www.campmkn.com/. A former camper, Todd, Rosenberg, the self-proclaimed, "Archer King," wrote a passage for the book discussing his glory days at Mah-Kee-Nac where he participated in an exciting archery competition which he thought about and worked on all year long with the thoughts of camp in mind. This book reminds you that you may leave camp, but it never leaves you, whether your hitting the books, sitting at your desk or just day dreaming. It encourages you to get back in touch with bunkmates and counselors. It is an absolute must for the "camp person," another way to relive those happy days.

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Camp Camp

Camp Camp is fun to read. Anyone who has gone to camp or is planning to go to camp can relate to the contents. Those who have not gone to camp can see what they missed.

Dear Former Campers,

Do you recall your glory days at summer camp as some of the best months of your life? Was your camp experience

*OK
*fun
*bunktastic!

When you think about camp, what are your best memories?

*singing "If I Had a Hammer" around the campfire
*winning color war two years in a row
*getting to third base with your camp crush

Open Camp Camp and head back to the one place on earth where appropriated Native American terminology, competitive sports, social heirarchy, and libido-soaked nights lived in wholesome harmony. Here is your trip down memory lane, a trip so beautifully illustrated and fully remembered that you can almost smell the pine of the cabins when you open the pages.

Camp Camp is a love letter to camp, a chance to relive every Champion sweatshirt-wearing, accidental-bed-wetting, sky-hook-wedgie-receiving, tie-dye-making golden moment via hundreds of photographs and stories straight from the source, including tall tales from AJ Jacobs, Rachel Sklar, Paul Feig, David Wain, Jamie Denbo, and Rodney Rothman.

Do you miss...
*camp friendships
*camp freedom
*camp fun

If so, then Camp Camp is your one-way ticket back to this magical world in which Fantasy Island met Lord of the Flies.

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