Product Description

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #443554 in Books
• Published on: 1999-01-15
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 288 pages

From Amazon.com
Feminist scholar bell hooks (Ain't I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism) has long raised uncomfortable questions about race, gender, and class. Wounds of Passion explores her long-term, sexually open relationship with Mack, a fellow poet she met as an undergraduate at age 19. Some years older and working toward his Ph.D., Mack, an urbane, physically striking black man, slips through the shoals of racial enmity in American academia while hooks slams up against them with passion and fury. "I talk about being black, curse, talk loudly, speak bluntly," she says, frustrated, but not surprised that this dooms her initial attempts to get a graduate degree. It baffles those who set and follow rules, too, starting with her father, who repeatedly tried to break her spirit as a child. Bearing witness to the wounds of past and present, hooks shuttles between straight narration and sometimes precious third-person observations. Raw and mean, hot and sugary, her feelings spill onto and stain the page.

From Library Journal
In this sequel to Bone Black (LJ 9/15/96), hooks (English, CUNY) reveals her passion for poetry, feminism, and the man with whom she spent 15 bittersweet years of her life. She returns to her painful childhood, to the oppressive South, to her abusive father, and then moves on to a relationship with someone who shares her intense desire for writing and sexual enjoyment. She continues her quest for love and acceptance, finding some semblance of peace and stability with this constant companion, but whom she eventually leaves. As in her previous book, hooks moves from first to third person, allowing the reader to eavesdrop on her innermost thoughts, hear of her bisexuality, and witness her fling with white men. An exceptionally written memoir; strongly recommended for poetry aficionados and feminist collections.?Ann Burns, "Library Journal"
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Kirkus Reviews
In her 15th book, hooks continues the memoir she began in Bone Black (1996). The little southern black girl who dreamed of being a writer from the age of ten is now a young woman entering Stanford University, away from home, from the South and Jim Crow laws, for the first time in her life. At 19 she takes a lover, Mack, an older black intellectual and poet, and begins work on the book that, 11 years later, would be her first published work, Ain't I a Woman? The relationship with Mack is at the center of this book, which is otherwise a review of all of hooks's usual concerns--race, gender, sexuality and desire, money and its uses and abuses, aesthetics, poetry. Her affair with Mack is turbulent, with an occasional undercurrent of violence that hearkens back to the relationship between her mother and father delineated in the previous book. hooks eschews conventional chronological structure to tell the story of her young adulthood and coming of age as a writer. Instead, she repeatedly moves back and forth in time, in chapters that are often organized thematically, shifting from third-person reflections on her young self to first-person recollections that move uneasily between past and present tenses. The result is an ungainly and repetitive hodgepodge of tones that's most effective when it's most conventional. At its best, the book contains flashes of insight that serve as a vivid reminder of how astute and downright brilliant a social critic and thinker the author is (as in a passing observation about the corrosive effects of ``quiet drinking'' in a family). But too much of this volume is either self-congratulatory gush (no author should write about how ``daring and difficult'' the book at hand is), or painfully misjudged efforts at poetic effect. Only a writer as good and determinedly idiosyncratic as hooks could have produced a book as misguided as this. -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.