Subtitles: The National Spelling Bee and the Culture of Word Nerds, The lives of five top spellers as they compete for glory and fame.

First we watched the movie Akeela and the Bee. Immediately, Brown Bear Daughter, who collects enthusiasms as if they were candy, told me that she wants to be in the Scripps National Spelling Bee. Actually, she wants to win the National Spelling Bee. Then, I saw this book at the library and thought I’d read it to find out what’s involved in spelling bee competition. I had visions of “stage moms” pushing their over-achieving children to memorize the dictionary and chidren who ended up neurotic by age fifteen.

If those horror scenarios are true, Mr. Maguire didn’t see them as he spent about a year researching spelling bees in general and interviewing some of the top young adult spellers in the United States. These are the kids who get to be on TV (ESPN) once a year as they compete in the Scripps National Spelling Bee in Washington, D.C. in late May, the week of Memorial Day. The children who compete at the national level come across in the book as somewhat obsessed with words and spelling bees and very competitive, but as Mr. Maguire reiterates in the book, the dedication and hard work required to reach the upper echelons of spelling competition must come from within the child himself. No parent or teacher could manufacture or coerce that kind of discipline and intensity in a middle school aged young person.

American Bee was published in 2006, and Mr. Maguire chose five spellers who were favored to win the 2005 National Spelling Bee and followed their individual paths to the nationals. Unfortunately (SPOILER) he didn’t happen to choose the child who actually won the 2005 bee as one of his five interview-ees. On the other hand, I looked, and one of the spellers he profiled in his book came back and won the National Spelling Bee in 2006 after the book was published. So maybe Mr. Maguire wasn’t such a bad picker after all.

Other chapters in the book give profiles of past spelling bee champions and what happened to them after their spelling days were over, information about the history of spelling and spelling bees, and a general history of English language spelling with an emphasis on why it’s so hard to spell many English words. Mostly, it’s because English is such a scavenger language and no one’s in charge of the development of the language. Did you know that France and Spain each have a government agancy that makes decisions about what words are allowed into the language and how those words will be used and spelled? Americans would never stand for such a bureaucracy . (By the way, I had a lot of trouble spelling that last word; most of the spellers in this book could have reeled it off without breaking a sweat.)

If you’re interested in words or spelling or kids and competition, American Bee is a fine introduction to a particularly engaging subculture. I’ll let you know if Brown Bear Daughter maintains her new-found passion for spelling long enough to actually compete. It’s not looking too promising; she’s already lost the spelling bee booklet she needs to begin her preparations.