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Summary: Coming home
Review: Clarissa Pinkola Estes put her pen to paper and gave the world's women a priceless gift. We learn by doing and living that we have to go away to truly come back home, and Estes offers the oft-times forgotten knowledge that no matter how far from home every woman has travelled, no matter how long she's been gone, no matter what blisters she has accumulated on her journey, Home is a place inside of her, and Home is someplace she can always find her way back to. That warm, beautiful, whole, innocent, un-hardened and intensely human part of each of us that survives and will always survive all we will encounter in our living. The medicine in Women Who Run With The Wolves will heal you over and over and over again.
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Summary: Loved it, but wanted more practical suggestions
Review: I thoroughly enjoyed this book; I found it to be heart-warming and inspiring. My only complaint is that I felt abandoned at the end. I heard the wisdom of the stories, and I felt the call to reclaim my own wild woman ... but how? It would be wonderful if there were a companion book or workbook to aid women in the practical ways of finding your strength and wildness. It was a little too abstract to be helpful, although it was undoubtedly educational.
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Summary: We are very lucky to have this book to read.
Review: In a time where we seem to get our mythology & folktales from movies, we are very lucky to have this book to read. C.P.Estes tells us age old folktales, interprets them for us, and with them inspires us to seek better lives for ourselves. I read only several pages at a time, and then I put it down for another day when I'll need inspiration. And, magically, the next pages that I read seem to apply exactly to the hardship I need to overcome that day. At best this book will change the way you think about the world. The least it will do is teach us to respect and honor ourselves and all other women.
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Summary: Pass it on
Review: As a mother , Who reads constantly, I found this book to be the one I will give to my daughters , for Christmas. I have delayed reading this book because I worried it would be difficult to read. It was , in parts , but the pull of the book and the continual revelation in each myth , overcame those difficulties. This truly is a "bible" for all women and I encourage mothers to pass it on to their daughters.
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Summary: Great book for any women
Review: Women Who Run With The Wolves is a bestseller that talks about the Wild Women Archetype. This book was published in 1995 by First Ballantine Books. After reading the book women can realize that a Wild Women lives within them with a desperate urge to free themselves from most of the experiences lived since childhood. Dr. Estés uses myths and folktales to illustrate how societies systematically strip away the feminine spirit.
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Summary: very witty and inspirational
Review: i loved this book,the author uses famous stories and tells how they relate to our everyday problems. she uses famous stories like the little match girl and the ugly duckling.she gives alot of inspiration in her work.
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Summary: Essentialist therapy.
Review: 10 years ago Camille Paglia provoked the academic feminist establishment when in her revisionist history of Western Literature, "Sexual Personae," she made a statement to the effect that if civilization had been left in the hands of women we'd still be living in grass huts. Estes' argument seems to accept the premise but with a positive spin. But what's the intellectual gain? Influenced by post-structuralist thought, the academic feminists of the seventies and eighties deconstructed the notion of an "essential" female identity, especially of a unified, universal, archetypal sort. As human beings, each of us has masculine/feminine, animus/anima, Apollinian/Dionysian elements regardless of our "biological" sex. Moreover, these elements are found in the characters of stories told by men as much as by women (consider Homer's Calypso, Athena, Nausicaa, Circe and Penelope or Virgil's Dido and Camilla). But if these books (I'm including the Iron John archetype as well) provide some readers with a sense of personal identity and self-affirmation that daily individual experience does not, perhaps they have some practical value.
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Summary: Wisdom and Native Lore: Women's Traditional Stories Retold
Review: Ancient cultures the world over have all had oral traditions as the roots of their literature, both for the purposes of education and entertainment. In the darkness by the fireside, story-tellers enthralled their fellow tribesmen with tales handed down through countless generations and centuries. What determines which stories are told and re-told on through the ages? Usually, they are tales which illustrate a moral value, a particular quality or a lesson that a particular society deems important. Whether it be a cautionary tale or a legend demonstrating a virtue, we get great insights into what is valued by examining the old, old stories. Until recent years with the advent of Women's Studies on university campuses, the teachings imparted to one's daughters and grandaughters were often overlooked. That glaring omission has been rectified through Clarissa Pinkola Estes' incredible book. "Women Who Run With the Wolves" is not light reading by any means, but is a scholarly exploration of the feminine character. Has civilization tried to strangle our basic "Wild Woman" inner natures? And, if so, at what cost has the shrew been tamed? "Women Who Run With the Wolves" contains some familiar stories from our collective childhoods: The Little Match Girl and Bluebeard. But these are not the soothing, toned-down versions to read by your toddlers' bedsides. Instead, they are terrifying and real. Estes, who is both a Jungian analyst/psychologist and professional storyteller, vividly recounts the visceral details of often violent folklore. Not only are European nursery tales included, but the book is global in scope. Estes also weaves in less familiar traditions, such as stories from the Lakota Indians. The one element running through all the stories is how they relate to women's lives and spirits. In each section, the author gives a scholarly overview of why the tale was told, what values it imparted, and why the story still speaks to us today. She also recounts the story with great dramatic narrative, and it is easy to imagine oneself listening to the tale around a flickering campfire late at night. Ancient wisdom coupled with modern psychological insights make reading this book a mind-expanding experience.
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Summary: A Book of Revelations.
Review: It was as if for the first time ever I saw my Great Grandmother, my Grandmother and my mother... and eventually also myself. Women Who Run With the Wolves is about allowing yourself to embrace womanhood. Not by burning bras or refusing to get married but rather by using what is already there, underneath all that, which makes us vulnarable and insecure in our gender. Estés takes the reader on an exquisite journey through our inner landscape and her unbreakable faith in the strenght of all women is contagious so that in the end you too cannot help but believe in yourself. Simply life-changing. What more could you ever want from a book?
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Summary: Spiritual
Review: A woman's bible? <chuckle>. Yes, I personally think that some would feel this way. I would not 'replace' it with bible <sigh>. Clarissa Pinkola has put to black-n-white, what I could not. She does not necessarily tell us anything that we do not already know, but merely reminds us. And yes, I agree, this is not a how-to-book. There are no 'expectations' other than self-acualization. It has much depth, some can read straight through, others a little at a time. I have come back to it time and time agian. From what I understand of her book, fables were told to help the individual to find their own answers. (Not much different from psycology today.) In each story, you are the princess, the evil step-mother, the magician, the prince, the nice old woman, the scarey witch. For it is you who allows yourself to be decieved. You can save yourself. You seek, you destroy. You create, you hide, you embelish. I have found much spirituality within this book. I talk of the 'power of a woman' quite often. How else can you stand by your man? You cannot do it when you are weak. How can your children depend on you and thrive later in life, if you cannot give them the foundation? This book does not tell you to go run outside without any cloths on, laughing at the world. (Unless that is your calling! :-).) It encourages you to believe in yourself via fables of long ago. I feel that it does shed light on 'social and economic realities'. (I.E. Chapter 9 Homing: Returning to OneSelf pg. 271) "The ego is initially born into us as potential and is shaped, developed, and filled up with ideas, values, and duties by the world around us: our parents, our teachers, our culture. And this is as it should be, for it becomes our excort, our armor, and our scout in the outer world. However, if the wildish nature is not allowed to emanate upward through the ego, giving it color, juice, and instinctive responsiveness, then although the culture may approve of what has been fashioned in this ego, the soul does not, cannot, will not approve such incompleteness of its work." Also, I find no 'generalization or oddities' in this book that are in any way offensive, if carefully read and comprehended. :-) It also is not just a book for women, as Clarissa states it is also for those men 'who choose to run with women who run with wolves.' In referring small portions of this book to men (I.E. Chapter 4 The Mate: Union with the Other) I have recieved postive feedback in parallel in better understanding the dual natures of both men and women. Clarissa's 'credibility and her considerable scholarship' come second to her gift of storytelling and love of anthropology. I admire her ability to take a close-to-authentic fable from different origins, and to educate, mesmerize, and encourage strenth to me, the reader.
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