Customer Reviews

The American Boy: A Photographic Essay

5 star:		(8)
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2 star:		(1)
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I love this book, it is so beautiful. Amazon suggested I tag is 'boy's nude' but it isn't a nudie book, the boys are mostly fully clothed and well dressed. I wish it was longer.

In an age when God-given beauty is held in contempt and most teens can't wait to get their first tatto or have God-knows-what pierced, dyed, engraved or otherwise mutilated, Bob Lamb has imortalized the very best that Heaven has produced! Thanks to every young face that graced the pages of this masterpiece. I hope you never forget the glory of youth and perhaps because of you the world will not be allowed to forget that this is the way our Maker intended it to be.
Bob Lamb has reclaimed from the animalworld that dignity that is mankind. And captured the central essence of all that is pure playful and remarkable in our race...BOYHOOD.

Bob manages to capture in stunningly beautiful images the joy and unlimited potential of boyhood, and in so doing, manages to remind us all how great it was to be -fleetingly, young not only at heart, but in mind, spirit and body as well.

Admittedly, the best looking, the most athletic; boys doing what boys were meant to do: at play, just hanging out; photos in every boy-mood!

Well done Bob Lamb & Jon David Douglas! Thank you. I know that these boys and their photos are real and not "styled." Keep up the good work!

As both a writer and photographer, I found this book outstanding. Bob Lamb's photographs capture the spirit and innocence of youth. Jon David Douglas' crisp, well written text guides the reader carefully through the visual experience. A man will find that The American Boy brings back memories of his own youth. A mother can reflect on the joys of watching a boy grow to manhood, with perhaps a touch of envy of the unselfish, uninhibited joy of living that Lamb's photographs show.

This book is abseloutly perfect....
Bob Lamb's pictures are true ART, and the kids themselves are also very
nice looking boys,.
It reflects a American Boy's life, Youth, and things they do, and love to "be",...
The comments in the book are as real as Life tiself....

Thank you Amazon.com for selling such a Beautifull piece of ART...
Sorry for my English cause i'm a French speaking Canadian
Merci
Thank You
Yves Guay Montreal,Qc Canada.

Got back from vacation today and found the book waiting for me. It is really spectacular! The artistic quality of the photos and the range of emotions and moods that are captured are truly wonderful. This is undoubtedly one of the best books of portrait photography I've come across. Hopefully it will find a wide audience.

I often wonder why people say "You manage to make your subjects look so natural," first off nobody naturally stands or sits in the poses these boys get into in real life. Nor do most boys stand around staring like they do or put on makeup and fix up their hair everyday as though they are going to a photo shoot even the sports shots look so strangely clean. It should also be mentioned the amount of work put into touching up the boys "blemishes" and making them look thinner is astronomical to the point they are hardly themselves or American Boys and maybe that's what the American boy has become a billboard for company logos and six packs. It also focuses mainly on Caucasian boys around 13-16 ignoring the stages of youth from 3-11 and 17-21. It also ignores to a large extent other ethnicities and body types (considering a large percentage of the population is overweight you'd think you'd seem some of them in this book). It also seems to focus mainly of sports players and skaters avoiding the aspiring painters and scientists who populate our youth.

That aside the photos are very well done by themselves but I think the title `American Boy' is misleading it should be `American Boy Models' because that is what all these boys are as you learn from his website and he has very high standards of the boys he will use in his work. In fact they are models he discovered. I understand the desire to examine what it means to be male in a society where masculinity is being shunned for equality and the feminist movement; I am doing my own series 100 boys in pencil. I just wish the boys were more every day and less fashion magazine models touched up to a perfection nobody, not even the models themselves, can achieve because it makes the "essay" aspect of the book seem like a lame cover for wanting to do a book of cute teen boy pictures (which wouldn't be bad if he just did that and called it that.)