Product Description

From the coauthor of the million-copy bestseller The Last Lecture comes a moving tribute to female friendships, with the inspiring story of eleven girls and the ten women they became.

Meet the Ames Girls: eleven childhood friends who formed a special bond growing up in Ames, Iowa. As young women, they moved to eight different states, yet managed to maintain an enduring friendship that would carry them through college and careers, marriage and motherhood, dating and divorce, a child's illness and the mysterious death of one member of their group. Capturing their remarkable story, The Girls from Ames is a testament to the deep bonds of women as they experience life's joys and challenges -- and the power of friendship to triumph over heartbreak and unexpected tragedy.

The girls, now in their forties, have a lifetime of memories in common, some evocative of their generation and some that will resonate with any woman who has ever had a friend. Photograph by photograph, recollection by recollection, occasionally with tears and often with great laughter, their sweeping and moving story is shared by Jeffrey Zaslow, Wall Street Journal columnist, as he attempts to define the matchless bonds of female friendship. It demonstrates how close female relationships can shape every aspect of women's lives - their sense of themselves, their choice of men, their need for validation, their relationships with their mothers, their dreams for their daughters - and reveals how such friendships thrive, rewarding those who have committed to them.

The Girls from Ames is the story of a group of ordinary women who built an extraordinary friendship. With both universal insights and deeply personal moments, it is a book that every woman will relate to and be inspired by.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #606 in Books
• Published on: 2009-04-21
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 297 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9781592404452
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

About the Author
Jeffrey Zaslow is a Wall Street Journal columnist and coauthor, with Randy Pausch, of The Last Lecture, the #1 New York Times bestseller now translated into 41 languages. Zaslow attended Dr. Pausch's famous lecture and wrote the story that sparked worldwide interest in it. The Girls From Ames also grew out of one of Zaslow's columns.

Customer Reviews

40 years of friendship
What first drew me to this book is the fact that I had cousins in Ames, and all through my growing up years, spent time there. It was fun to see the names of places I recognized and, upon contacting my relatives, finding out that they were friends with some of the families mentioned in the book. The personal connection aside, I found the book well done and very interesting. The author writes a column for the Wall Street Journal called "Moving On", and one piece dealing with turning points in women's friendships yielded an e-mail from one of the "Ames Girls", telling about their group of 11 who had remained friends since childhood until now, in their forties. He decided to do a year-long study of that friendship which results in this book. We get a good look at each of the girls as they're growing up and as they become adults. Amazing to me is the diversity of these women and the fact that they could all stay close for this many years. That's the beauty of the book, and of the friendship. In spite of different life philosophies, political leanings, and careers, through thick and thin (and there are plenty of life crises among them), they are always there for each other, regardless of geographic distances. Whether physically, emotionally, or both, they are there. The author does a bit of comparison with men and their close friendships, and how they differ so completely from women's friendships. But this doesn't come off as a "study". It comes off as an accolade to these women, who have been so blessed to have each other.

A Book I Really Wanted to Like
In THE GIRLS FROM AMES, author Jeffrey Zaslow documents the backgrounds of a group of friends from Ames, Iowa. What's remarkable is the group's size, 11, and its longevity, more than 40 years. But what's not remarkable is the book. Zaslow manages to wring 316 pages of writing from interviews with, and conversations between, these women, and it reads like it has been wrung--from a dull topic. The women's relationships just aren't that interesting. Why? Is it the author's at-a-distance documentary style? The book's mundane topics? My thwarted expectation that I'd learn something new about friendship? I don't know. And it's not because I don't greatly value my own longstanding friendships. I rely on them.

Who might enjoy THE GIRLS FROM AMES? Men and women who live/have lived in Ames, people who enjoy reading about aspects of the agricultural Midwest, women's groups, high school classmates who are still friends several years after graduation.

Engrossing read
This book chronicles the lives of 11 girls who became friends in their youth and have maintained that friendship over 40 years and hundreds of miles. They all came together in Ames, Iowa in the 1960s with some having met as babies in the church nursery while others joined the group later in junior high and high school. There were, and are, shifting subgroups and pairings within the group so not everyone was friends with everyone else equally. It describes how the group was formed over the years and who brought who into the group and how the evolved into who they became. It follows them from their earliest years to the present and the group is still intact (minus one member) and they still view each other as best friends even though 40 years have passed and they are geographically spread across the country.

There were several things that attracted me to this book -- I loved "The Last Lecture" by this author, I am only one or two years older than the women in this book, I was born and raised in the midwest (city of 130,000 in Indiana) and one of my first friends out of college went to Iowa State in Ames, Iowa. All that combined meant I was excited to dig in and read.

For those of you who are looking for stunning insights into the meaning of life, that is not what this book delivers. It's more of a case study of these women, their lives and their friendships. I found myself totally engrossed and finished it within twenty-four hours since I couldn't put it down. What the book did for me was to make me think about my own path and life choices and the impact (or lack thereof) of childhood friends and wonder how some friendships stay intact while others fade. Even though there are many parallels between these girls and me, I found many differences as well -- they were much "wilder" than my group of friends was during the teen years and my group of friends did not stay together, not even Christmas cards. It really made me contemplate why some women's friendships survive and some don't. There is also some good research shared by the author about women's friendships and when they are likely to pull apart, how they compare to men's friendships, and correlation betweeen friendships and overall health.

I found this book to be interesting and causing personal reflection and introspection -- who could ask for more?