| View Larger Image | The Shelter of Each Other | Paperbackby Mary Pipher (Author)
| List Price: | $16.00 | | Price: | $12.00 | | You Save: | $4.00 (25%) | | | Available: | Usually ships in 24 hours |
| | Binding: | Paperback | | Publisher: | Riverhead Trade | | Page Count: | 368 Pages | | Publication Date: | November 25, 2008 | | Sales Rank: | 462,596nd |
|
FEATURES | - ISBN13: 9781594483721
- Condition: NEW
- Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
- Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices
|
EDITORIAL REVIEWS |
Product Description
In The Shelter of Each Other, Mary Pipher does for the American family what she did for adolescent girls and their parents in her bestselling book Reviving Ophelia: she opens our eyes wide to the desperate realities we are facing and shows us a way out. Drawing on the fascinating stories of families rich and poor, angry and despairing, religious and skeptical, and probing deep into her own family memories and experiences, Pipher clears a path to the strength and energy at the core of family life. Wise, compassionate, and impassioned, The Shelter of Each Other challenges each of us to face the truth about ourselves and to find the courage to protect, nurture, and revivify the families we cherish."A canny mix of optimism and practicality gives Pipher's fans a way to resist the worst of the culture around them and substitute the best of themselves." *Newsweek"Eye-opening . . . Pipher's simple solutions for survival in this family-unfriendly culture are peppered throughout the heart-wrenching and uplifting stories of several of her client families. . . . Highly readable, passionate." *San Francisco Chronicle"Compelling." *USA Today |
CUSTOMER REVIEWS (Average Customer Rating: 4.5 based on 20 reviews)
|
Another "It Was Better in the Good Old Days" Book by aurore75  2 Stars
October 02, 2008
I was sadly disappointed by "The Shelter of Each Other" -- with such rave reviews, I expected a book that would focus on how families can go about being closer, warmer, literally more sheltering in today's world. Instead, this book is mostly an exaggerated diatribe against today's culture and an overwrought paean to the Good Old Days. Pipher even claims in the book that she's not romanticizing the past, only to add this astonishingly naive statement: "People didn't do things they didn't want their neighbors to know about." It would be funny if she weren't serious. For anyone subscribing to the Things Were Better In The Good Old Days view, I'd recommend "The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap" by Stephanie Coontz.
Pipher paints a lopsided picture of the past, filled with simple, upstanding folk who carry the secret to moral behavior while she completely overlooks the rampant racism, sexism, homophobia and other social problems. Let's not forget that part of these supposed Good Old-Fashioned Values included boozing it up, smoking like chimneys, knocking around the wife and kids, excusing date rape because "hey, she's loose", and (well into the 1930s) rounding up a lynch mob to take care of alleged crimes by non-whites.
Pipher's view of the present includes appropriate concern about rising violence, but she also seems horrified by Nine Inch Nails, MTV and Beavis & Butthead. As someone who was a teenager in the late 80s/early 90s, I just can't take this seriously. Those things seemed frightening and incomprehensible to our parents, but in today's light seem almost quaint. And so it goes through the generations.
There are a few nuggets in this book: parents should make time for regular date nights, turn off the TV three or four evenings a week, eat meals together, have a family night each week, and get back to nature more often. Unfortunately the few nuggets are buried in hundreds of pages of fear-mongering and nostalgia.
| |
The Value of Family by Mary Cooke-Jones (Taipei, Taiwan)  5 Stars
October 20, 2007
In this book, Mary Pipher identifies problems that the American family faces today which are new and different from those faced by previous generations. She states that families are frequently blamed for these cultural problems, but in fact, it is the culture itself which has become the problem, and families are our haven in the storm, our most cherished institution, and our "last great hope". She describes the many ways American culture has changed, such that nowadays, children grow up in a "consumption-oriented, electronic community that is teaching them very different values from those we say we value". She reminds us that a healthy culture is one where its members are free to grow and develop personally and encouraged to work hard for the betterment of others. She describes the destruction of the protective walls around children, and the concurrent destruction of the elevated position of adults in today's "electronic village". Problems today are internal to the family, who struggle to coordinate schedules so they can share a meal together before again heading separate directions. Years ago, the enemies of the family were external, such as poverty, disease, or natural disaster, and were faced bravely when members of each family united to help one another.
The author maintains that psychologists have sometimes done great harm to families under the guise of doing providing good life solutions. She is open and honest about her profession, recognizing that while some are saviors, healers, and teachers to their clients, others irresponsibly or ignorantly dispense wrong advice, causing more pain, strife, and sickness than the clients came in with. Pipher reconnects therapy to responsibility and advises that psychologists apply theories and treatments that are appropriate to the time, place, culture, and personality of the people involved. She reiterates the importance for families to be supported, protected, and validated by professionals, so that by connecting people, in families, extended families, schools, and eventually communities, people's most basic need - love - will be met, and they can then find hope for the future.
She talks about the accountability that comes along with close relationships, those relationships of longevity, where you know the person's family, where they live, where they work, where they worship, and still remember the dog they got in fifth grade. Instead of living life with real people, more people nowadays live fantasy lives, caring more about celebrity marriages than they do the people in their community. She quotes George S. Trow's writing: "We are becoming more childish. We're falling out of the world of history into the world of demographics where we count everything and value nothing." Pipher asserts that the relationship between children and their teachers is not an incidental relationship, but rather is "the central component of their learning". She contends that human development occurs within the context of real relationships, because we learn from those whom we love.
She doesn't just provide us with a laundry list of problems, but also provides solutions at several levels. She provides answers to why the status quo cannot continue, if we really want to make changes for the betterment of society. She then offers strategies for therapists who want to make a significant difference in the outcome for their clients by providing quality family therapy. Furthermore, she shares survival solutions for the lay person who is reading the book. These solutions tell us what essential qualities should be included to ensure that children develop optimally. She expands that idea to talk about connecting families together, and then, to building community.
Reading about her grandparents, the Page family, was delicious. Although it is evident that their lives held hardship as well as joy, they are so real that they seem larger than life. As in everything, Pipher provides practical advice, for example, describing how the Bible gave the family a common well of knowledge and language, as well as providing answers to hard questions about life, making sense of their individual existences in the light of a bigger picture and much larger purpose ordained from above. She also details the values that were reinforced universally at home, at church, and at school, where folks were more concerned about your character than your psyche. Hard work was part of family life, and while physical labor was shared by all, so were the benefits: "calves branded, kraut chopped and put in jars, gardens weeded and hogs butchered". Consumption of goods was regarded to be an undesirable necessity, certainly not a lifestyle. Happiness was not the goal of life, but rather, making a positive contribution of your time, your talents, and doing what was right.
| |
Poor writing, recycled premise. by Lily C. (Portland, OR USA) 2 Stars
August 12, 2005
I expected so much more from the hallowed author of "Reviving Ophelia"! Instead, this book recycles the same old stuff about how this generation of children have no values, and how her generation (of course) was raised on the correct moral fiber. She even goes so far as to lionize both the Victorian Era and the 1950's, quite possibly the two most repressed periods of Western history. Every time she used the phrase, "junk food culture with junk values," I craved a Krispy Kreme and wound up gaining 10 pounds as a direct result of repetitive phraseology. As if decrying the state of any culture's youth is a new concept: I think someone in the Nile delta there may just be a clay tablet with heiroglyphics bemoaning the values of ancient Egypt's youth, their obsession with all the wrong things, and how the previous generation did things SO MUCH BETTER.
And, dear lord, the writing! Almost all of her sentences are ten words long (yes, I counted) which made the prose very stilted and awkward, and the effect was worsened by her insistence on beginning at least one sentence per paragraph with an indefinite article. Ouch. My advice? Look elsewhere for insightful commentary on today's family. Read "The Shelter of Each Other" only if you are looking for confirmation of your own previously-held beliefs on how today's culture is going down the tubes.
| |
Very Reassuring by C. Melcher 5 Stars
August 25, 2004
This is such a great book for parents raising children in the modern world to read. With all the messages we get about how easy it is to screw up our kids, this one shows how to set a good foundation. Also good I think for adults trying to heal relationships with their birth families.
| |
Timely and Important: A Must Read For All Parents by Robert J. Burdick (Los Altos, CA) 5 Stars
May 20, 2002
I picked up this book after reading the equally important "Reviving Ophelia." "The Shelter of Each Other" is an important guidebook on how to get your family back from the clutches of American junk media, job stress and day care. This book is ungently needed by any parent with factory farmed kids who spend their days with nannies, in day care, and in front of the tube watching garbage videos. But it is equally useful to involved parents who want to be one step ahead of the corrupting and damaging influences of life in America today. Read it and heal.
| |
SIMILAR PRODUCTS |
| Seeking Peace: Chronicles of the Worst Buddhist in the World
by Mary Pipher (Author)
In this thoughtful and inspiring memoir, the author of the New York Times bestsellers Reviving Ophelia, The Shelter of Each Other, and Another Country explores her personal search for understanding, tranquility, and respect through her work as a psychologist and seeker.
“There are three kinds of secrets,” Mary Pipher says in Seeking Peace: Chronicles of the Worst Buddhist in the World. “Those we keep from everyone, those we keep from certain people, and those we keep from...
| 
| Another Country: Navigating the Emotional Terrain of Our Elders
by Mary Pipher (Author)
Mary Pipher's phenomenal New York Times bestseller-a book about us and our parents...
"[Pipher] ventures into communities and then returns to explain their truths and ways of being to the rest of us in clear, clean English. Totally accessible...[Another Country] is a compassionate...look at the disconnect between baby boomers and their aging parents or grandparents." -USAToday
There are more older people in America today than ever before. They are our parents and grandparents,...
| 
| Writing to Change the World
by Mary Pipher (Author)
From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Reviving Ophelia and The Shelter of Each Other Words are the most powerful tools at our disposal. With them, writers have saved lives and taken them, brought justice and confounded it, started wars and ended them. Writers can change the way we think and transform our definitions of right and wrong. Writing to Change the World is a beautiful paean to the transformative power of words. Encapsulating Mary Pipher's years as a writer and...
| 
| Hunger Pains
by Mary Pipher Ph.D. (Author)
We live in an appearance-obsessed culture. Fashion ads, magazine covers, TV shows, and movies idealize a body type that is impossible for most real women to achieve. In this comforting, liberating book, Dr. Mary Pipher, bestselling author of Reviving Ophelia, offers advice, counsel, and practical solutions for understanding our needs, our fears, and our many hungers. She shows us how we can at last learn to live at peace with the natural differences in our bodies and appetites. The rates...
| 
| Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls
by Mary Pipher (Author), Ruth Ross (Designer)
The phenomenal #1 New York Times bestseller. More than 1.5 million copies sold. Now available from Riverhead.
This is the groundbreaking work that poses one of the most provocative questions of a generation: Why are American adolescent girls falling prey to depression, eating disorders, suicide attempts, and dangerously low self-esteem? Dr. Pipher posits that it's America's sexist, look-obsessed "girl-poisoning" culture-one in which girls are constantly struggling to find their true...
|
|
|
