Rating: 
Summary: Lost in the Bell Jar
Review: While many people rave about this story I fail to see where it's brilliance is. I read it upon recommendation by a friend. And while I did enjoy the style in which it was written, overall this book left me feeling empty. I felt I had wasted my time. Mostly because I could not at all sympathize with the main character except in the most extreme of cicumstances, such as the shock therapy. Other than those few moments, I did not feel like she was subject to any unusually cruel acts or treatment. The majority of my disappointment came in the end. I felt there wasn't any kind of payoff, no real conclusion.Maybe I was distracted by all the little notes my friend had written in the book. Maybe it's simply because I'm a guy (which I sincerely doubt.) Personally, I would much rather read Ms. Plath's poetry than trudge this this little volume again. I give it two stars, for while I didn't necessarily enjoy the plot, the prose were downright hilarious at times!...
Rating: 
Summary: sylvia is esther greenwood
Review: prior to reading "the bell jar" i read some of sylvia's unabridged journals and there wasn't much of a departure from her real life and the book. now i understand that writers use their own lives to draw from, but this book wasn't much different from reading her own journal entries. it didn't strike me as this literary masterpiece. if i hadn't read the journal entries perhaps i would have felt differently about the book.
Rating: 
Summary: The Bell Jar
Review: Sylvia Plath is an amazing author. The fact that she relaesed such an intimate time in her life to be praised or ripped apart by critics shows she was not afraid. The Bell Jar is a well written, informative look into the mind of someone losing all sanity. In fact while you are reading it you will catch yourself questioning your own sanity!
Rating: 
Summary: Bell Jar Book Review
Review: The Bell Jar, written by Sylvia Plath, takes the reader on a very in depth and personal trip through depression. The book is written through the eyes of Esther Greenwood, the priveledged college student struggling to find reality and her true self throughout the book. While she should be having the time of her life, Esther sinks deeper into the depths of severe depression. She loses most of her sense of reality, which distorts her mind and eventually even her vision. What Plath leads the reader to believe is that Esther is brought to depression due to her lack of relationships with others. Esther seems to make minimal effort to form any kind of relationships, which leads her into isolation from the world and her life. Although she does form friendships with some characters throughout the book, in her mind she still cannot relate to them. This book was very appropriately named, because when Esther reaches her deepest points of depression, it is as if a bell jar has come down over her, which isolates her from the world. Her mind and vision become so distorted that it is like she is looking through its glass and living her life from underneath it. What is interesting and unique about this book is that it is written through the eyes of Esther. Sylvia Plath is able to take the reader through all stages of extreme depression in some intense and disturbing detail. She must have experienced some form of depression in her life to be able to describe depression so accurately from the viewpoint of Esther. The Bell Jar is an incredibly creative, yet disturbing book with an intirely new aspect for the reader.
Rating:
Summary: Under The Bell Jar
Review: In reading this book I became very depressed. Esther didn't have any thing good to say about anyone. Everyone was ugly in some way. There was always something wrong. Of course, the shock treatments she had to endure would make anyone negative. What were those people thinking? The Bell Jar echoes madness from start to finish. The entire book was difficult to take. I didn't want to read time after time of Esther trying to end her life. In fact her life was really just beginning.
The author Sylvia Plath puts her descriptive writing to great use. She chronicles Esther's life with great style. Esther just didn't have such a great life. Her boy friend, Buddy, was nothing but a thorn in her side. I think Esther felt she was above Buddy and rightly so. It's too bad Esther had to go mad during the time that she did. If this were to happen now there would be a lot better cures for her to turn to.
I think it's difficult to read a book about going insane. I guess because it make you question your own sanity. The pressure that was on Esther was mainly the fact that she was an over achiever. The author wrote that she studied too much; she didn't really know when to quit. I think it was a very sad book. Too read about someone with such an enormous cloud over their head. Really more like a bell jar over their head.
Rating:
Summary: Scary, Funny, Wonderful.
Review: What else can possibly be said about this book that hasn't already been said since it was published in '63? It's fiercely personal, it's scary as hell, it's laugh-out-loud hilarious. Plath has the ironic first person voice of Esther Greenwood down cold, and her dark sense of humor is what makes this book so much more harrowing. What amazes me most about reading the Bell Jar now in 2002 is how modern it seems. Plath was way, way ahead of her time.
Rating:
Summary: Deterioration of the Mind
Review: This is the first and last novel of Sylvia Plath and a permanent indention in the literary world. The story begins with the awakening of a young Esther Greenwood to her own uniqueness and eventually the self-awareness that drove her mad. She realizes that she is alone in the world and that there was no one that in any way resembled herself. She shares her innermost thoughts of those around her:
"The figures around me weren't people, but shop dummies, painted to resemble people and propped up in attitudes counterfeiting life." She also reflects with her own difficulties with the prospects of love.
"And I knew that in spite of all the roses and kisses and restrauraunt dinners a man showered on a woman before he married her, what she secretly wanted when the wedding service ended was for her to flatten out underneath his feet like Mrs. Willard's kitchen mat. What a man wants is a mate and what a woman wants is infinite security, and, what a man is is an arrow into the future and what a woman is is the place the arrow shoots off from." This story was the self-prophecy of Sylvia Plath and allows us to travel on her potent emotionally wrenching journey.
Rating:
Summary: Life Through the Bell Jar
Review: "The Bell Jar," a classic novel by Sylvia Plath, describes the dark depressed world of Esther Greenwood through her battles with depression, which paralleled the author's in many cases. The novel is semi-autobiographical and includes Plath's harrowing experience with an attempt at suicide.
The story begins with Esther and eleven other girls in a New York city hotel room, all winners of an internship from a fashion magazine contest. It follows her through a variety of adventures as she slowly sinks deeper and deeper into depression. The slow demise of Esther's mind is shown and explained in her attempt at suicide to her experiences in a rehabilitation center and is made to seem almost, but not completely rational and understandable to the reader.
"The Bell Jar" is a compelling and engrossing book that will keep the readers eyes glued to the page until the abrupt ending.
Rating:
Summary: Good
Review: I read this book for the first time when I was 15 years old. I thought it was mere happenstance that I encountered it, and every since that first introduction it has stayed on my mind every since. Sylvia Plath was one of the most interesting writers of our time. She wrote what she felt and rarely has there ever been another like her or will there ever be. I feel that the mere emphasis on depression in her book was indeed a wake up call for many during that time. During the 1950's people did not readily express their emotions, basically what wasn't socially acceptable was generally locked up inside. It was no accident that Plath chose to write about her own neurotic feelings from the perspective of someone on the outside looking in. I clearly believe that Plath was desperately relaying her feelings in terms of the constant hopelessness and utter betrayal that she possibly felt as a brilliant,young, white woman during the 1950's who was relatively endowed with all the possibilities that one could ever hope for but still utterly depressed, lonely, and confused. This book gives wonderful insight for those who are depressed,lonely, and confused. Plath actually comes to a sort of numbness when she realizes that the planning and hoping as it might be to be the best is not all that it is cracked up to be. This book is brilliant, and unfortunately Plath committed suicide during her short life and career. Sometimes, I ponder about what could have been if she had lived just a little bit longer. We all face times in which we are unsure but we must strive to continue on. "The Bell Jar" was and will always be one of the best books that I have ever read. Its not like "Lisa Black and Dark" or any other dark literature that I can recall at this time. It is because it is a real encounter of a real woman in search of love, comfort, and truth.
Rating:
Summary: review from an adolescent point of view
Review: having suffered from clinical depression myself, i found this book an exceptional piece of work in the sense that plath described esthers feelings so brilliantly that i could relate to it all on such a personal level. the descriptions she used were not too different from the ways in which i had attempted to describe my feelings at a point in time, however the poetry of her prose is brilliant. whilst reading the book, i commented to others that it is inevitable that plath had to have experienced these issues herself because there is no other way she would have been able to use descriptions the way she has. only after having checked out her website now, i realise this is true. the thing that destressed me a bit is the fact that the term "nervous breakdown" is used too broadly as far as i am concerned. perhaps this is due to the date of publishing in the 1960s where psychiatry was not as advanced as it is today...its seems more to me that esther was suffering a serious mood disorder (a chemical imbalance) more than anything else.
i found the end a bit disappointing aswell, it was unclear what the outcome of all her treatment was and i was looking forward to reading about the long term results of what happened to her.
this book comes highly recomended for anyone who enjoys narrative novels and especially fans of j.d salingers "catcher in the rye". i found the similarity uncanny...
enjoy ( if thats that possible?)!
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