Mystics, Mavericks, and Merrymakers
by Stephanie Wellen Levine

So here goes another in my series of book reviews.

I finally finished reading this book after a solid two years of on and off again reading. I don't mean to imply that the book was difficult to get through. I found it quite interesting and liked it quite a bit.

I suppose what gives me greatest pause is that Levine's study seemed less about the girls and more like the meanderings of a Ph.D.'s attempt to cull a lot of data and publish it so she can get tenure. Her analysis at the end of the book adds no new insight and the ideas have been published before (to even less effect) in the works of Naomi Wolf and other feminists who have studied culture, Americans, women, and growing up. What she adds to the decades-long discussion are vignettes that illustrate a non-unique opinion that such issues like personal growth and character development are theresult of spiritual, community, peer group, and parental factors. I enjoyed that this work was being done on a Jewish group such as Lubavitch Chassids and appreciated the range of individuals Levine chose to include in the book.
The individual gleanings of who each character was in Levine's work were interesting. Sometimes the pieces didn't seem to be about the person the chapter was named after, which was rather disappointing and potentially the result of some editor's pen.

Perhaps it is just that I have thought all these things myself, though I never wrote a book about them, that I decided the book might be a tad on the trite side, becuase she makes calls to people to change the education system... calls which I personally assume fall on deaf ears. Who is reading her book? What impactdoes she reallyt hink she will have? I'm completely unsure.

Anyway, for anyone unfamiliar with Jewish communities of the religious variety she's talking about, this may be a fascinating read. I recommend it highly also to men.