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Bell Hooks is a cultural critic, feminist theorist, and writer. Celebrated as one of our nation’s leading public intellectual by The Atlantic Monthly, as well as one of Utne Reader’s 100 Visionaries Who Could Change Your Life, she is a charismatic speaker who divides her time among teaching, writing, and lecturing around the world. Previously a professor in the English departments at Yale University and Oberlin College, hooks is now a Distinguished Professor of English at City College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. She is the author of more than seventeen books, including All About Love: New Visions; Remembered Rapture: The Writer at Work; Wounds of Passion: A Writing Life; Bone Black: Memories of Girlhood; Killing Rage: Ending Racism; Art on My Mind: Visual Politics; and Breaking Bread: Insurgent Black Intellectual Life. She lives in New York City.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
It really captures the feel of a bad mood,
By Charles Ashbacher (Marion, Iowa United States) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER) (VINE VOICE) (HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)
This review is from: Grump Groan Growl (Hardcover)
The style of the lettering and the background images are perfect for illustrating a foul mood. Written in a manner suggesting that they were drawn with a wide paintbrush, the letters give the appearance of having been spoken by a very unhappy person. The figures of living creatures are drawn in a minimalist style that appears primitive; some of them reminded me of what you see in ancient cave drawings.
The point of the story is that when you are overcome with dark feelings the best thing to do is to ride them out, let things pass until the grumpiness goes away. There are only 57 words in this book, yet in combination with the illustrations manage to tell a complete and valuable story about living with your bad moods. This is a good book for young children.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
My 3 y.o. LOVES this book, it speaks to all ages. Easy reader, too!,
By
This review is from: Grump Groan Growl (Hardcover)
Great for any kid who has ever felt angry!
Let me preface by saying that we were already hooked on Chris Raschka's book Yo! Yes? (Scholastic Bookshelf) in which he is able to express an awful lot content in very few simple, small words. Similar idea here - bell hooks's poem "Grump, Groan, Growl" is a simple poem describing how anger feels, and it's easy enough for a toddler to understand, but she doesn't talk down to the reader or try to moralize about appropriate behavior. It's modern poetry and it captures a universal emotion (and how to control and redirect it) quite eloquently. In remarkably few words, bell hooks (yeah, that's a person's name, even though there's no capital letters and both names are nouns for everyday objects - it threw me, too - maybe it's a poet thing. Anyway, where was I? Oh yeah!) bell hooks expresses the need to embrace, not squelch, powerful emotions, but also not allow them to control you. Passionate intensity is a *good* thing, if one learns how to modulate and control it. It's a fairly powerful idea, really, that of accepting powerful emotions as valid, allowing ourselves to feel them, yet not letting them overwhelm and emotionally flood us. Don't suppress the emotions, learn to master your response to them so they don't control you. There are many ways to "let those feelings be. Just let them pass. Just go inside. And let it slide" -- learning to handle intense emotions gracefully (rather than by lashing out) is a pretty useful skill at any age. I wouldn't be surprised to learn that bell hook's didn't necessarily have kids in mind when she wrote this. The poem itself would be equally appropriate on the first slide of a corporate power point presentation on "Anger Management" as it would as a book in the waiting room of a child (or adult's) psychologist's office, or as a conversation starter in a philosophy or inter-personal communications class, or on the bookshelf of a cognitive scientist, or (in this particular book with Raschka's art) in any preschool or kindergarten room. How cool is that? Now, about Chris Raschka's part. I picked up this book because I so thoroughly enjoyed his earlier book "Yo! Yes?" which is written in huge letters, frequently with just one or two words per page. (Brevity is the soul of wit.) Like hooks in this book, he expresses a great deal with remarkably few simple words, so both are great early reader books, although they aren't advertised as such. The words are no more complex than what you find in many very early reader books, the most complicated words being ones with silent "e" like "inside" "outside" and "slide" - and maybe "groan" because you don't pronounce the "a". (The text in "Yo! Yes?" is even easier - it's a GREAT first book for a beginning reader.) If you think you're going to lose your mind if you have to suffer through one more insipid book about a dog and a frog on a log or a cat named Matt, this is for you. Other reviewers commented that the pictures are "ugly" and unappealing. Well, yeah, I think that was kind of the *point* guys - to visually express the feeling of being somewhat out of control. Didn't we get past the bit about all art having to be "more beautiful than real life" about a hundred years ago? C'mon! True, the illustrations in this book don't look like Jan Brett's or even Maurice Sendak's. I like both of them, too, but this is different - it's SUPPOSED to be different. (For that matter, "Where the Wild Things Are," although quite wonderful, does scare pants off some little kids.) This book isn't just "well-intentioned," it's very well-executed, too, IMHO.
2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Grump,
By
This review is from: Grump Groan Growl (Hardcover)
Hooks, Bell. Grump Groan Growl. Illustrated by Chris Raschka. Hyperion Books for Children. 2008.
This well-intentioned but primarily unappealing picture book works to capture the feel of a child experiencing a dark mood. Mostly muddy illustrations accompany a word or word phrase: one double-spread shows the word "Grump" on one side against a background of tan and red across from a figure that looks like a monster, its mouth down-turned. Another double-spread displays the phrase, "Bad Mood on the prowl" splashed in black paint against some bright colors, a vaguely suggested figure is outlined in black. As the angry mood becomes more controlled, the figure of the child becomes more recognizable. Offer readers instead, Maurice Sendak's "Where the Wild Things Are (Harper and Row, 1963) and Molly Bang's When Sophie Gets Angry...Really, Really Angry (Blue Sky Press, 1999).
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