AUGUST 2023 - AudioFile
Adenrele Ojo gives an outstanding performance of a series of conversations between bell hooks and Cornel West. These two friends and colleagues discuss the complex realities of Black intellectual life. In between their conversations, hooks and West insert essays that they've written about each other, highlighting their academic achievements and mutual admiration. Ojo narrates the book beautifully, bringing a range of emotional depth to her performance of hooks and West's conversations. She creates unique voices for each author, making her narration easy to follow. But since much of the book is a dialogue, this audiobook is a missed opportunity to bring in a second narrator to perform with Ojo and enhance the listener's experience. K.D.W. © AudioFile 2023, Portland, Maine
Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly
A series of dialogues between and interviews with two of the foremost black intellectuals in America today, this volume is of enormous importance and offers rewarding reading. At the outset, hooks describes these conversations as a kind of ``testimony,'' in the religious sense, to ``what it means to be Blackstet cap intellectuals at this historical moment.'' West ( Prophetic Fragments ) and hooks ( Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black ) talk frankly about the difficult necessity of moving beyond the academy to reach an audience in the black community at large. Much of their talk focuses on the violence done to the black community by consumer capitalism, by rampant market forces that have eroded the traditional institutions of support within the community, replacing them with a Big Mac and designer sneakers. Both are suspicious of the easy appeal of certain brands of black nationalism currently fashionable, but their analysis of those trends is balanced and convincingly argued. In her concluding essay hooks, drawing on her own childhood experiences, writes movingly of the pressures put on black women to reject intellectual pursuits. (Jan.)
Library Journal
Activists and academicians hooks ( Talking Back , LJ 12/88) and West ( Prophetic Fragments , LJ 3/1/88) share roots in the black church and a commitment to the life of the mind. This, their first joint publication, takes the form of a dialog that explores diverse aspects of modern African American culture: the spiritual crisis in the black community, conservatism among the black middle class, the new black nationalism, depictions of African Americans in popular culture, uses of black icons by modern political leaders. Of particular interest are their discussions of gender and politics; both feminists, they hope their own intellectual engagement can serve as a model for new kinds of relationships between black men and women. Although they rely too much on academic jargon, these two have important things to say, and this book's audience should by no means be confined to blacks. Highly recommended.-- Beverly Miller, Boise State Univ. Lib., Id.
From the Publisher
Praise for the book:
"bell hooks and Cornel West's wonderful volume is theoretical poetry, poetic theory....The scope of topics addressed in the far-ranging conversations between the two authors is breathtaking....[The book] not only theorizes about how a transformed intellectual power might fuse deep moral concern and political engagement--it actually does it."--Patricia Hill Collins, Signs (Autumn, 1994)
"A series of dialogues between and interviews with two of the foremost black intellectuals in America today, this volume is of enormous importance and offers rewarding reading."--Publishers Weekly
Praise for the book:
"bell hooks and Cornel West's wonderful volume is theoretical poetry, poetic theory....The scope of topics addressed in the far-ranging conversations between the two authors is breathtaking....[The book] not only theorizes about how a transformed intellectual power might fuse deep moral concern and political engagement--it actually does it."--Patricia Hill Collins, Signs (Autumn, 1994)
"A series of dialogues between and interviews with two of the foremost black intellectuals in America today, this volume is of enormous importance and offers rewarding reading."--Publishers Weekly
AUGUST 2023 - AudioFile
Adenrele Ojo gives an outstanding performance of a series of conversations between bell hooks and Cornel West. These two friends and colleagues discuss the complex realities of Black intellectual life. In between their conversations, hooks and West insert essays that they've written about each other, highlighting their academic achievements and mutual admiration. Ojo narrates the book beautifully, bringing a range of emotional depth to her performance of hooks and West's conversations. She creates unique voices for each author, making her narration easy to follow. But since much of the book is a dialogue, this audiobook is a missed opportunity to bring in a second narrator to perform with Ojo and enhance the listener's experience. K.D.W. © AudioFile 2023, Portland, Maine
