This is an excellent book for someone who, like the author, is seeking spiritual fulfillment--or for anyone who simply wants to know more about Eastern and "alternative" religions. Clores is brutally honest about the ups and downs of her spiritual quest. She is a likable and entertaining guide, and the tone is light, despite the seriousness of the topic. This probably sounds funny, but I think that this book would make an excellent Christmas/Hanukkah gift. Too many of us forget that there is a rich spiritual world outside the gates of the major organized religions.

This is a collection of articulate, very personal, first-person accounts of some (diverse!) young women and their bodies: their hair, their skin, their muscle, their fat, their immune systems...you get the idea. My favorites include a black woman on the suspicions her "healthy" diet raises, a nice mile-long trek in the shoes of a woman with severe allergies, and the "Klaus Barbie" essay, which may be worth the price of the whole thing. I thought all the contributions were enlightening, though some are funny, some angry, some sober, and some pretty devasting. Cheers to the girls, though: they always come out on top. Obviously not the sociological, serious stuff here, but we need the straight-up story-telling as well. You'll find something in here you relate to--and probably where you don't expect it.

Adios, Barbie is THE book I would recommend to any feminist, young and old. It is one of the few books to try and tackle the broad continuum of race, class, and age while exploring body image. It is a diverse group of essays that truly give hope to women that one day we will be able to love ourselves and each other.

"Ophira Edut is one of those renaissance kinda gals who causes you to wonder what you've been doing with all your spare time. The founding publisher of HUES (Hear Us Emerging Sisters) magazine, a web designer, illustrator, writer and lecturer, she has been creating public space for women and girls to raise their voices and be heard for years. All this, and she's still in her 20s. With Body Outlaws, Edut has brought together 26 different women's voices to collectively challenge unrealistic mainstream mythologies of beauty and body image. Body Outlaws is a republication of Edut's first book Adios Barbie, with the addition of two new chapters and a slightly revised introduction...

I don't think that I would be amiss in surmising that as women/girls, we each have body image issues. Obsessions that evolve out of our own human body's failure to measure up to unrealistic lifestyles and standards of beauty that surround us. The articles in Body Outlaws deal with all these insecurities and misgivings with a refreshingly honest approach. Perhaps the most interesting thing about the articles that Edut has collected, is the spectrum of body issues that they address. Not focusing on the traditional obsession with weight alone, Edut's contributors speak on skin, noses, hair, lips, butts and the like.

...The writers in Body Outlaws are unabashedly frank, willing to reveal their own complicated "-isms" in their privileging of qualities of "the other" over their own. The book is worth the investment for Nomy Lamm's piece alone. Her honest and witty style always charm the pants off me. Here she addresses the issue of actively engaging in beauty and enjoying and celebrating your own sense of style and artifice rather than pretending that looks don't matter. The two new articles -- one by Christy Damio on losing her eyesight at age 13, and the other on being a plus-sized model, by Kate Dillon - are excellent additions to the anthology.

Body Outlaws is up there on the list of books that I wish someone had given me when I was 13 years old to help me deconstruct all of the negativity that I was beginning to stockpile about my relationship to my body. To that end, it is a book I intend to pass on to every young woman I encounter. As a woman in her mid-twenties, its strength is not lost on me and it is a welcome addition to my library. So head to your favourite neighbourhood bookstore or online vendor and get yourself a copy. With the variety of voices and perspectives represented within this collection you will be sure to find something that resonates." --Emira Mears can be found at Soapbox Girls.

Having read this book for my feminist theories class, I was shocked at the celebrity afterward from Angela Davis, which admitted she hadn't initially thought our generation of feminist theorists was important enough to read for their own sakes.

Because Davis had once pointedly lectured both the women's movement and mainstream society about the dangers of making presumptions (and subsequently allowing those preconcieved notions to guide your own politics) I had hoped she (more than any other second waver name-dropped in this project) would also be aware of the dangers from ageism.

My heart consequently fell as I realizes she was never actually interested in 'bridging' or mentoring with my generation of feminist activist/theorists, but simply touting her own horn about how great she was, and how by implication we would somehow never be able to match up. Ironically, the multipronged social justice strategies she freely champions in other settings become impossible with her own condescending view of 'feminist activism' since a single generation of activists will not live forever, and younger ones might provide critical insights for victory (that is assuming they were allowed to speak in meaningful ways, and were listened to).

No, Davis might not like everything in exactly the format that is said by the newer theorists, but then the proverbial million dollar question begs: Why lend your name and words to something you don't particularly care for at all anyways?

Editor Walker (daughter of Alice Walker) bears some responsibilty for this literary mess since she seems to have culled 'famous feminists' from her mother's rolodex without pondering if they would actually treat herself or the audience as whole people, instead of annoying interlopers who are threatining 'other's' feminist movement.

Such, a shame too because this book really could have been a huge breakthrough with the correct editing.

I read this anthology after reading Gloria Steinem's Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions and another anthology that I think was called Voices From the Next Feminist Generation. Thank you thank you thank you Rebecca Walker for creating a forum for this incredibly diverse and colorful group of feminists who completely reshaped, juggled and challenged every "rule" about what it means to be a feminist. I treasure the knowledge and power I have accrued from reading the first two books and now, after reading Walker's book, I feel that my understanding of gender, race and class issues is even more rounded out. This is a critical book for any feminist and anyone who is willing to read about feminism,(probably to discover that they too, are feminists).

This morning I was sitting in the Laundromat down the street quietly reading Rebecca Walker's anthology of feminist essays, To Be Real. I was reading the line "in much of our understanding, power is equated with oppression: images of white supremacists dominating people of color, men dominating women, and the rich dominating the poor underline the histories of many cultures and societies," in an essay by Jason Schultz, when an ironic thing happened. I heard pieces of a conversation between an older white man and a middle aged white woman that was going on the other side of the room. I heard words like, "nigger" and "lazy" within phrases like "all they do is make babies and live on food stamps." I couldn't hear whole sentences, and so I tried to shut them out and read my book. Another girl my age was not so lucky. She was waiting for her clothes to dry, just a few feet from the conversation. Just before leaving the scene, she approached the two and said "I'm sorry, but some of us are trying to do our laundry and we shouldn't have to listen to your racist conversations..." The old man threw up his hands, mocking her, and said, "Ok, we'll stop. Peace, man." She went on, and again I could only hear bits of her words, over the whining drone of washing machines. I heard her say, "the problem is your redneck mentality," and "educate yourself." But her words fell on deaf ears. As she stormed out to her car, carrying load after load of laundry, the two small town residents mumbled about her things I could only imagine to be extremely offensive. I followed her out to her car to congratulate her. I told her that I agreed with everything she said and that she was a strong person to have done what she did. At the same time I felt immense guilt. Because I, the Feminist, did not get up and go over there to hear the conversation that I knew to be oppressive, and that I was not the one who said something. Here I was, reading a book about how Feminism needs to fight towards equality- not only between the sexes-but in terms of Race, Sexuality, and any form of difference. A book whose essays, compiled by the incredible Rebecca Walker, were personal confessions about times when each author was forced to question their own position in the feminist movement. I felt that I had just been tested, and failed. So I began to analyze the situation. Had I been standing closer to the conversation would I have responded as this other girl had? I would like to think so. If the target of oppression had been gays and lesbians instead of black folks, would I have responded? Most definitely, I don't think that I would've been able to help myself from attacking the attackers. So what does this say about me? That unless I, myself, am part of the group being oppressed I wouldn't get directly involved? The point of these questions are exactly what Rebecca Walker is bringing up for discussion. We, as individuals, have to ask ourselves such things in order to determine who we are and what our place is within this Third Wave of Feminism. This Third Wave encompasses the notion that there is no one way to be a feminist, and that there is no betrayal in being yourself. As humans, we will fall short at times, and we will constantly surprise ourselves.

I am also 31, mixed, have a Jewish step-dad, and was raised by activist parents as well. Obviously, I ran to get this book.

I also saw a reading Rebecca Walker did on CSPAN in Maryland. She has an amazing voice and she really brought the material alive during the reading. I think she has a vast amount of wisdom & experience to share and she handled the question and answer segment amazingly well.

Unfortunately, this book is not all it could have been. It reads like a very good first or second draft but it simply isn't cohesive or particularly insightful and should not have been published yet. I really wanted Ms. Walker to move beyond cataloging events to weaving a story, a narrative that explored her experience AND connected it to a larger discussion about race.

The experiences she had especially having activist parents are ones that many of us can relate to but she never pushes the work past her self. Why does she think her parents raised her the ways in which they did? An exploration of their motives could illuminate some of the ways an entire country was shaped by the 60's.

She doesn't extrapolate from her experience to show how her experience as a "brown" woman is significant, how it is different than mono-racial teenage angst. Maybe that complete experience is ineffable - but there aren't any real moments that show the complexity of our experience as mixed race people.

She really needed someone who believed in the importance of this book and the story she could have told. I think her editor simply thought this would sell based on the subject matter and the fact that her mom is a famous writer.

I applaud Ms. Walker's attempt but I am disappointed in the final product.

All you mixed people out there - we need to write and connect with each other - keep working! And we really need some male mixed voices!

In this beautifully written memoir, Rebecca Walker discusses what it was like to grow up with a black mother and Jewish father and feeling as if she were a part of neither world. She describes being taken to her father's new home for the first time after their divorce - she had been at her mother's house, her father explains to her, and now she is going to her father's house. She wonders which of these is HER house, a question that is a recurring theme of the book. She describes her pain at not having her own world and instead feeling out of place (either too black or not black enough) in each of her parents' worlds. My biggest complaint with the book is that we don't actually get to see much of the woman that the child grew into. The book ends rather abruptly with her high school graduation, so we don't get to see Rebecca nagivate her own place in the world, outside of her parents' homes and lives. She has accomplished a lot since graduating high school, so it would have been nice to have seen some of that. However, she is still a young woman, so i imagine that she is still becoming the woman that she will be, and still trying to find her own place in the world. Perhaps, then, this book was a little premature?

I read Black,White and Jewish for the impressions of another "half-breed," to know someone else feels the way I do, because we've both "been there." I'm 43, born biracial before biracial was cool or prevalent. I found a lot I could identify with in this book, and it brought up many forgotten incidents and feelings. For that reason alone, it was worth the purchase price.

Black, White and Jewish is also an interesting commentary on Alice Walker. Reading Ms. Walker's books, I would think she'd be more attentive to her daughter's emotional needs. But what I see is another American woman at a loss when it comes to connecting with her daughter. In many ways, Rebecca's story reads like that of an adult child of divorce. In contrast to her "different" racial status, she remained simply another American teenager, trying to figure out who she is.

I'd like to read Rebecca's story in 10 years after she's (hopefully) had a chance to grow up. It seems she hasn't quite figured out who she is yet.