Customer Reviews
Recommend this, even though it is dated 
2007-08-09
The existing reviews cover many of the crucial points, though I would like to reiterate how parents and teachers could benefit from the insights these teens provide.
It's often too tempting for adults to measure the success of our youth with illusionary criteria, avoiding what's at the heart of things. I found the teen's accounts of their lives and Patricia Hersch's conclusions realistic and hopeful.
Though there are some tough scenarios, overall the reader is left with a spirit of assurance that youth is an amazingly resilient time of life and a few cultural corrections can make the difference between dire consequences and an aspired future.
A Tribe Apart 
2007-05-15
A very interesting and captivating book. The best alternative to a text for a graduate level Adolecent Behavior course.
compelling 2007-02-05
Partrica Hersch is on a mission. In her book A Tribe Apart, an in-depth study of the lives, behaviors, and opinions of eight adolescents, Hersch argues that today's teenagers are victims of an uncaring, un-involved adult community. Hersch's teens, for the most part, raise themselves. They grapple with adult-sized problems such as abortion, drug use, crime, physical abuse, and neglect--all while facing the "normal" slings and arrows of adolescence. Teens solve the problems they face with very little adult interaction, with the educators, parents, and other adult mentors conspicuously absent. Hersch concludes that today's teens don't exist in a moral vacuum, as social critics might suggest. Instead, she presents teens who reason, debate, and make choices--all without adult guidance or support. The adults who populate the teens' worlds are neglectful--ranging from abusive stepparents, over-worked mothers, self-absorbed fathers, or educators more concerned with discipline and control than forming relationships with kids. It is little wonder that the decisions they make are poor ones. While I do agree with other reviewers that Hersch makes wide-sweeping generalizations about teens and their relationships to adults based upon a limited sample, her point that teens are facing increasingly trecherous problems alone is well-taken. It's easy to feel demoralized after reading A Tribe Apart, and one wonders how adolescence will continue to devovle in the coming decade.
A look from inside 2006-12-06
I've seen people say this book does not cover the mainstream or is not the best read, but I would disagree. Hersch takes the time to listen, to let 8 students tell their story. I was in high school at the time when this book was being published, and it is much more accurate that most adults care to realize. It is a narrative, but it is an accurate look at the millennial generation. The only other book that I have seen to compete in accuracy would be 'Hurt' by Chap Clark, but it is more of an academic read. Anyway, if you care for an inside look of adolescence, here is your chance.
Easy read, But Not Revolutionary 
2006-05-11
A Tribe Apart by Patricia Hersch was a revolutionary book for its time period: 1996. Now, ten years later, I am not sure if the information presented is all that revolutionary. The research for this book was completed when I was in middle and high schools, and now I am the teacher, so how can many of the issues be as new and extreme if I, and many teachers I know, have experienced many of these issues already? Hersch does an excellent job exposing the "normalities" of high school students in the mid 1990's; I am curious if a current study would reveal the same findings. The themes she explores that I do not think have faded away with the turn of the century are the distance between adults and adolescents, the multitude of adult issues our adolescents have to cope with, and the need for peer acceptance over all other needs.
While at the same time deserting our adolescent generation, Hersch says that society has also managed to load them with adult responsibilities. Teens are more often aware of their parents problems, and are being forced to deal with issues far beyond their capabilities. I see that these issues have not faded with time in my conversation with my students. Some of my sixth graders tell me stories about being evicted from apartments or their parents' credit card debt, and I can see that Hersch's research still rings true.
Despite the latter basic truths to Hersch's research, she describes many outdated practices of adolescents such as "mosh pits", the "wamma" culture, the clothing, and the attitudes of some of the students. I think that some of many practices she explored have been replaced with more dangerous and exaggerated ones: rap culture, "hanging out" on the streets for younger and younger students, and increased exposure to societal pressures. In the 1990's, I feel like there were more opportunities for adolescents to thrive and experience life in safe environments. Now, the budget cuts that Hersch mentions very briefly are a country-wide phenomenon. Schools everywhere are experiencing cuts of after-school clubs, music, art, physical education, and sports; not just city schools. This pushes our adolescents further and further into their own world, making Hersch's findings only the beginning. Now, I think that a researcher would find the danger has escalated and children younger than what would be considered "adolescence" are experiencing these kinds of problems.
The way Hersch engulfs herself inside the life of each of her case studies, makes the reader feel as if the adolescents themselves were telling their own stories. So if you are looking for an interesting and entertaining sociological text, A Tribe Apart is a great read. But if you interested in getting a peek inside the minds of your students or teenage kids, I suggest you pick up a more recent text.
A Tribe Apart 2006-03-07
For three fascinating, disturbing years, writer Patricia Hersch journeyed inside a world that is as familiar as our own children and yet as alien as some exotic culture--the world of adolescence. As a silent, attentive partner, she followed eight teenagers in the typically American town of Reston, Virginia, listening to their stories, observing their rituals, watching them fulfill their dreams and enact their tragedies. What she found was that America's teens have fashioned a fully defined culture that adults neither see nor imagine--a culture of unprecedented freedom and baffling complexity, a culture with rules but no structure, values but no clear morality, codes but no consistency.
Is it society itself that has created this separate teen community? Resigned to the attitude that adolescents simply live in "a tribe apart," adults have pulled away, relinquishing responsibility and supervision, allowing the unhealthy behaviors of teens to flourish. Ultimately, this rift between adults and teenagers robs both generations of meaningful connections. For everyone's world is made richer and more challenging by having adolescents in it.
a tribe apart 2005-11-09
Journalist Patricia Hersch spent a year following half a dozen or so teenagers, charting the trials and tribulations of their everyday life. Her subjects include Jonathon, a perceptive and philosophical minded young man; Chris Hughes, who is just starting seventh grade; Brendan, an angry drug dealer and Christian; Ann, a straitlaced girl from a broken home; and Joan Garcia, a troubled artist. Her goal was not to profile the teens that received negative attention in the news, but what "constituted `normal adolescence' for `regular kids' today." Each subject gets several chapters with intriguing titles like "Honour and Other Relative Things," "Rearrange Your Room When You Can't Rearrange Yourself," and "It's My Prom My Life." The subjects opened up and came to see the author as someone they could confide in, and the book is full of painful revelations into their family, friends, hobbies, work and recreational activities. Hersch concludes that all of today's youth need mentors, not just the disadvantaged ones; and that most of today's kids are trying the best they can to live in an often difficult world. Few who have read the book will argue. I agree that with other reviewers that these subjects are not "typical" teens, but perhaps there is no such thing.
Important Reading 2005-09-17
A Tribe Apart offers the results of Hersch's six year project to enter the "tribe" of American adolescence and learn its secrets. Not all the adolescents are confused and conflicted, but they share a changing sense of what "normal" adolescence is. For a couple, drugs are a normal and expected aspect of being an adolescent, something they simply do. Hersch's strength is that she largely lets her subjects speak for themselves, free from her judgment or censure. This "She says...She thinks..." approach can become tiresome, but more often it reveals. Statistics and the voices of adults help add perspective to Hersch's account, but, even then, it is not Hersch herself who is speaking. The general effect is to evoke the world of adolescence while recognizing its broader context. A reader feels empathy for all of Hersch's teens because she presents them as innocents, unaware of their own contradictions and their manipulation by forces around them. The book is more horrifying because we like these kids who do these horrifying things.
A Good Editor was Needed 
2005-05-19
This book was required reading for one of my education classes and copious amounts of coffee were required to get through it. The author's intent was noble but the end result reads like a first draft,(a very long first draft)a sort of stream of consciousness, in an effort, I would assume, to be authentic and true to the youths' words. I had to keep rereading to figure out who was who. I found the writing very amateur and the profound realizations almost embarassing. These few kids are not an accurate crosssection of our youth society (as other reviewers have pointed out.) At least two of the kids has been physically abused and another has an acute psychiatric condition. I think it is irresponsible to call this journalism, and to present it as such. I probably would have been better reading as a novel. Also--Did anyone else wonder about the incredibly well-adjusted Chris with the perfect parents and the many details of his life only a mother would know??
heartbreaking look into American high schools 2004-11-23
Patricia Hersch, a journalist living in Reston, Virginia, details the lives of 8 young people living in her town in A Tribe Apart. All are chosen because they seem to represent "normal" young people walking the halls of the town's middle and senior high schools. Through Hersch's voice the audience hears the voices of Chris, the youngest and most meticulous of the bunch, Jessica and her older sister Ann, daughters of parents too busy and self-absorbed to really see the pains that weave in and out of their daughters' lives, Brendon with his early hopes and eventually the crashing of those dreams and his turn to graffiti and drug dealing, Charles and his struggle for excellence in athletics and school life, Jonathan, the oldest and most self-reflective, Courtney and her anything-goes lifestyle and finally Joan, trying to escape a cycle of depression. While the young people do fit into the different stereotypes that populate high school according to Hollywood, Hersch delves deeper into the words, thoughts and lives of the Reston teens to show the reader the special uniqueness of each. In the final section Hersch deals with the family histories of all the teens and the reader begins to see how interrelated the families are with each child. Even more, behind the seemingly random and self-destructive behaviors one sees glimpses of children seeking love and numbing pain from the lack of it.
The final chapter in Hersch's book demonstrates the deep love she was able to cultivate toward the adolescents she befriended in Reston. Her deep pain in view of the tougher lives of some of the teens especially reminds the reader that though the lives of the teens were told with brutal honestly, it is also told by one that was able to open her heart to the adolescents, and as a result of this confidence, was able to capture the hearts of the adolescents. Thus while the brutal realities of the adolescent years through different subcultures is displayed in A Tribe Apart, it is done in such a way that the reader can catch a glimpse of the everyday struggles as well as the heartbreaking pains weighing down the teenage heart and its subsequent aftermath. While identifying each subculture Hersch is still able to capture the unique beauty in each adolescent, clearly emphasizing the yearning of the teen for love and acceptance, in the family and with peers. Thus while A Tribe Apart details life in the suburbs of Virginia the story is applicable in any American neighborhood.
