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Summary: What about moms?
Review: Having read both "Reviving Ophelia" and "Ophelia Speaks" I am dismayed that mothers are so frequently mentioned yet so rarely heard from. Then again, Hamlet didn't have a role for Ophelia's mother either.Pipher and her companion Sara Shandler both offer us insight into a diverse, if not representative group of young women. My real interest lies with the moms! Help me write the book "Ophelia's Mom" to let the world know what it's like to parent a young woman. Send your 1-2 page stories about mothering a teenaged girl to Ophelia's Mom, Box 458, Hershey PA 17033. Include your name, address, and anything else you think is relevant, and mail by June 1, 2000.
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Summary: Reviving Ophelia-Why You Should Read This
Review: Reviving Ophelia is an eye-opening book that relates the stories of many young girls as they struggle as "saplings in the storm," a term that the author, Mary Pipher Ph. D., uses frequently to provide a metaphor of how adolescent girls feel as they battle all of the problems that are thrown at them al they attempt to survive growing up. They want to keep their true selves; be independent, stay close to their families, and to have friends, yet be unique all at the same time. All of the messages threaten to snap them in half just as the saplings in the storm. The examples that she supplies for the reader are rather extreme for the real world, but they bring out a harsh truth in society today. Girls feel pressured by society to conform to their ideas of what a girl should grow up to be like, even if society's ideas are conflicting. They feel that they are in the middle of a storm without knowing how to get out. They lose some connections with their parents that could have helped to hold them up. Yet, the examples were exceedingly useful in seeing the world through each of the girls' eyes. They helped to transport the reader into an intriguing new world that, until recently, was unfamilar to many Americans. This is also why Reviving Ophelia is so realistic. It maginfies many of the raindrops from the storm that spill on girls everywhere. These are all true stories! Sometimes it is hard to imagine, but the author takes you there. Girls are suffering and as an old saying tells,"What doesn't kill you make you stronger." I enjoyed this book because it correctly mirrored society and would be an extremely enlightening and useful book for anyone concerned about America's future.
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Summary: Reviving Ophelia
Review: Revivng Ophelia, a book written by Mary Pipher, presents an honest and open look at adolescence. For the first time young girls' voices are allowed to be heard, unmuted, --the front lines of adolescence. She presents each girl's story in a strikingly candid way that inspires the reader. Throughout her book, Pipher often discusses the effects of the silent war that is raging in America. She believes that every day young girls are forced to fight to maintain their true selves in the face of societal pressures. Pipher offers herself up as an example of what may happen if one loses this daily battle. This brings a feeling of maturity and empathy to the information and guidance that she imparts in her book. The book's limited view-point on issues can be viewed as its flaw. Pipher's book presents clearly the negative issues teenage girls are forced to deal with, yet it leaves out the many positive aspects of an adolescent girl's life. This makes the book difficult to read because of the depressing and other painfully honest flow the book assumes. Mary Pipher has a point to make and she does it very well. She brings to the attention of a nation the burden of injustice and violence that its young women bear. I would recommend this book to anybody who wants to sit down and read a good book, full of insights and advice. This book is among my favorites because it helps me find different ways to view the world around me.
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Summary: Thoughts on Reviving Ophelia
Review: The book, Reviving Ophelia, by Mary Pipher, Ph.D. is an attempt at understanding the female adolescent experience in the modern world. Dr. Pipher traces the problems of female adolescents today to our "dangerous, sexualized, and media-saturated culture," in which girls are pressured to be gorgeous and sophisticated. Girls easily misinterpret these cultural expectations and feel they have to be sexually active and chemically abusive. Dr. Pipher connects these cultural expectations combined with the desire for more independence as the main cause for the multitude of adolescent females in therapy today. She shares her experiences with girls who have life-threatening problems; the urge to physically hurt/mutilate/kill themselves or anorexia. She also shares less dangerous but more complicated problems such as school rejection, underachievement, moodiness, or consistent disagreement with parents. Dr. Pipher shows how these problems and cultural influences affect girls of many different families; separated, divorced, mixed, and traditional. Dr. Pipher opens the window of teh "hurricane" of adolescence in her book, Reviving Ophelia, reviewing and analyzing the obstacles and turbulence adolescent females encounter; "the problem without a name." This book is a good reference for parents seeking guidance to help their adolescent daughters and for adolescent females to refer to for guidance. Adolescent girls can read this book, find help to their complicated problems, learn how to help a friend, and realize they're not alone in their struggles.
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Summary: Reviving Ophelia from the male point of view
Review: This book shares real life stories from girls who go through tough times in their adolescence. The author of the book, Mary Pipher who is a therapist, analyzes each girl's stories and explains what she feels is the problem. The book is divided into topics such as eating dosorders, divorce, drugs, alcohol, friends, and parents. It explores how our current society and media negatively influences today's adolescents. This book is good for parents, girls, and, yes, boys. I felt that reading this book from a male perspective gave me insight into the issues that female adolescents encounter in contrast to the issues male's face. It is important for male's to understand the issues and problems that females go through, so that we may be empathetic and helping. Some os the problems that females go through are caused partly by what male's role in society is and how male's act toward girls. The book is very different because it is written by a therapist who analyzes everything, which makes it hard to follow sometimes but the main message is a good one. The main message being that all teens have struggles going through adolescence and that there are ways society can help. I would recommend you to read this book. I guarantee that you will be surprised as to what the real world is really like and the impact it had on adolescents.
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Summary: The Survival of Adolescent Girls
Review: Being an adolescent in the world today is very frustrating, especially if you are a girl. This book deals with many different situations that face adolescent females. It was very informative and I feel that everyone who has any connection with teenage girls needs to read this book. Being a parent of both boys and girls had its ups and downs, but dealing with girls was especially hard. I wish that I had a copy of this book when my girls were adolescent, because I feel that it would have helped me to be able to understand and deal with situatiuons a little differently. People fail to realize all the problems that an adolescent faces, especially in today's fast paced world. I would strongly advise parents to read this book. I believe it will open their eyes to a lot of different situations. All adolescents need our attention whether they be male or female, but it seems that girls tend to need just a little bit more special attention. Its hard being an adolsecent today and so many parents refuse to admit that they don't spend enough time with their kids. Girls especially need someone not only to talk with, but just to be there to listen.
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Summary: An eye opener for all
Review: Reviving Ophelia is a must read for anyone who is interested in learning more about their daughter(s) or learning about the pressures that girls receive while growing up. This book made me realize the pressures that girls get from school and classmates. I would strongly recomend reading this to any gender. I am a male and this book gave me a lot better understanding for females dealing with adolescence. It shows how media and other things can do so much damage to a girl. Mary Pipher does a good job with relating her patients to the book that she wrote and giving strong support of what is going on in our society. I give this book a strong four stars and would strongly recomend to anyone with a daughter.
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Summary: Even if YOUR duaghter doesn't have these problems
Review: Even if YOUR daughter doesn't have these problems.... It's important to remember than many of her friends WILL, and that those tortured kids will be doing all sorts of dangerous things. Unfortunately, our society holds up extremely damaged women (Madonna, Monroe, Di) as role models. Actually, this book could do a much better job in this respect. I read this book a couple times, and I liked it better on subsequent readings. The author describes struggling kids with the usual problems ( alcoholic parents, absent parents, abusive or frightening parents, mentally ill parents, death, abandonment, incest). Although the author makes useful points about the role of the family, this gets diluted by the theme of society and its effects. Cleary, the effects of society are miniscule in many of these cases, except to provide maladaptive coping strategies to kids that have already been virtually destroyed by their home environments. And even though this is a book about mental health and the family, the word "neurosis" does not appear anywhere in it. Why? Finally it dawned on me, all the talk about society is to provide profoundly troubled families with a palatable explanation. If blaming society will allow one parent of an anorexic kid to seek help, that's a good thing even if the parents won't ask themselves about alcoholism, divorce, and mental illness. The book does a pretty good job of presenting case histories without any jargon, and the marketing about the role of "society" sugarcoats what would be a very bitter pill. It lets parents blame their family's troubles on mysterious "other" people, and even lets parents be outraged at them. In that sense, the book flirts with a form of politics and marketing more sinister than anything ever used to sell cosmetics. For the rest of us, the case histories are good, the explanations are shallow and unsatisfactory (probably by design). If the reader is looking for something a lot more rigorous, I'd suggest "Hysterical Personality Style and the Histrionic Personality Disorder," which addresses questions "Ophelia" never could - like why do some preschoolers exhibit sexualized behavior? What drives parents to encourage it?
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Summary: Enlightenment...
Review: I wish I had read this book during the tumult of my adolescence. It should be required reading for anyone who has signifigant impact on the life of any teenage girl. I would like to comment on Christopher Sibona's 2/22/00 review. While I detest psycho-babble and am hesitant to place blame for our daughters ills, I found this book to be profound and right on the money. And, yes, almost every teenage girl I knew/know had some class of eating disorder. We all hated our bodies and were comsumed with trying to change them. Anorexia and bulimia are the only psychological disorders people want to have. Believe me, to a teenage girl, dead is really better than fat. But off my soapbox. I hope that anyone who's come so far as to read a review of this book will take the next step and order it. I also recommend Ophelia Speaks by Sara Shandler and for the male side of this subject Lost Boys by James Garbarino and Real Boys by William S. Pollack.
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Summary: A Glimpse into the Lives of Teenage Girls
Review: Every adolescent girl should read this book, it gives insight and understanding about the effects of peer pressure, abuse, family, high school, friends, media, society...etc. on our lives. It shines a light on the sources of turmoil in the lives of teenage girls. The author, Mary Piper,PH.D., takes the approach of not blaming families, "...it's important to look at the cultural context. Rather than blame each family for the unhappiness of its daughters, we need to examine what it is in our culture that destroys the happiness of so many teenage girls." She examines what our culture has trained girls to be and how/what it takes to break those ideas that have been branded upon adolescent girls, and women in general. She shares the stories of many girls and in most cases exposes the roots of their problems and the changes required to begin healing. I found it very informative and deep. Through reading it I have discovered the meaning of some of my own behaviors and attitudes. It gives a raw, realistic glimpse into the lives of teenage girls.
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