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3.0étoiles sur 5
Not quite as good as it could have been, Nov. 18 2003
This is an important book. It's a book teenagers should read, it's especially a book their parents should read, and it's a book educators, politicians, publishers and artists should read.So why do I only give it three stars? For a book this celebrated, it is just far too narrow. Yes, we do live in a look-obsessed, sexist, girl-poisoning culture. Yes, it is extremely damaging and harmful to women, and can plausibly be linked to eating disorders, self-mutilation, and depression, as well as to violence and sexual abuse. Yes, we should be worried, and educate ourselves and others. But this book answers the question of why American girls are falling prey to depression, eating disorders and suicide at such alarming rates with only one answer, when the real answer is undoubtably a complex mixture of causes. In her anxiety to take the blame off the parents, the author doesn't have much to say about all the cases where the parents ARE even partly to blame for their teenagers depression. Hundreds of thousands of teenagers live with abusive home situations. Others suffer from clinical depressions which although they might be triggered in part by environment, can not be entirely explained by them and may need medical treatment; others suffer from appalling poverty, or racism, or other problems we don't see addressed. I wish this book were more comprehensive. I wish it included other teenage voices, to give a more complete picture. The voices it shares with us are ones which need to be heard - but they are far from being the only ones, and I finished this book with the feeling that they had drowned certain other voices out.
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