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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Looking within for a reason to believe!, April 22, 2003
ROCK MY SOUL: BLACK PEOPLE AND SELF-ESTEEM By bell hooks Lest we forget the importance of feeling good about ourselves, bell hooks, the quintessential black feminist writer has added yet another tome to the many outstanding references to the literary canon of African-American culture. Here, she gives us Rock My Soul: Black People and Self-Esteem. No less provocative, but ever so poignant, the panache is intact as she talks with passion on a highly debated topic that is always at the cutting edge of discussion in our communities. There's no book that this author has contributed that doesn't get the overall treatment with candid and insightful analogy. Self esteem and what it means to people of color will always be high profile and a force to be reckoned with due to the scars of slavery and unbalanced scales . Without self-esteem everyone loses his or her sense of meaning, purpose, and power. For too long, African Americans in particular have been unable to openly and honestly address the crisis of self-esteem and how it affects the way they perceive themselves and are perceived by others. In her most challenging and provocative book to date, bell hooks gives voice to what many black people have thought and felt, but seldom articulated in a way where doubt would hold sway. She offers readers a clear, passionate examination of the role of projecting positive images and having the confidence to allow the playing field to be equaled to play in the African-American experience. This is essential in determining whether success is individual or collective. In gathering research for the project, the author delves into the methods and reasons why she used the paradigms to construct this project. She painstakingly listened to the stories of her students, peers, and people from different walks of life and heard the same arguments, including deep feelings of inadequacy and despair. With critical insight and a fervor bent on finding answers, the author exposes the underlying truth behind the crisis. In her estimation, it has been extremely difficult to create a culture that promotes and sustains a healthy sense of self-esteem in African-American communities...and this book gives all the reasons and supportive analogies thereof. What I found interesting and gave me such a positive vein with this book, is how she rigorously examined and identified the barriers -- political and cultural -- that keep African Americans from emotional well-being and a sense of belonging. She looked at historical movements, the role the community plays in this issue, gave introspective analogy why self is just as important at arriving at conclusions, and how the family came to be so involved. She also discusses the revolutionary role preventative mental health care can play in promoting and maintaining self-esteem. The question will always be asked: Why is self-esteem so on the forefront of our societal emanation? This book does quite a bit to understand how racism has been abated, relative to how often-negative reaction to integration has crippled the black community leaving deep psychological scars and extremely low self-esteem as blacks compete by imitating whites. I recommend this book to give compelling arguments and subsequent solutions for a far better understanding of the issue than has been given to us up to now.
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16 of 20 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
I mean, it was okay......., January 20, 2003
By A Customer
hooks continues her path down the self-help genre with this latest book about black people and self-esteem. hooks posits that for several decades black people have pointed to racism as their only barrier at the expense of examining personal matters like the loss of self-esteem. In this text, she tries to find a middle ground in which racism is acknowledged but low self-esteem is addressed. Unfortunately, assessing racism takes up so much of the text that many readers may completely forget the message about self-esteem. Further, while hooks affectively points to where black self-esteem is lacking, she says very little about how it can be regained. In so many ways, hooks is beating a dying horse. Her book Salvation could have been attached to her book All about Love and Rock My Sould could have been attached to Salvation. Whereas in her love books, she clearly spells out the definition of love and emphasizes love in every chapter, here self-esteem gets lost in the mix and is given charecteristics but never concretely defined. hooks loves patting herself on the back for being able to talk about race, class, and gender simultaneously. In this book, her love of male heroes Malcolm X and Dr. King shines through. Though consistently pro-black, in this book hooks actually praises whites for their resistance to sexism and rigid gender roles and condemns blacks for embracing those two oppressions. Still, hooks uses kid gloves when critiquing McWhorter and other black conservatives in contrast to her complete trashing of Wolf, Roiphe, and Paglia in her book Outlaw Culture. hooks is great at summarizing black history. She re-illustrates how thoroughly and widely she reads. Nevertheless, she quotes Nathaniel Branden so often, one wonders if she has just taken his book(s) and given it (them) a chocolate-y twist. If you've read her other books, so much of this book is repetitive. We already know she has conflicting feelings about rapper Foxxxy Brown and detests Sharazad Ali and "Waiting to Exhale." hook often mentions "terrorism" in this 911 era, but her use may seem pat and overblown to some readers. hooks has added "imperialism" to her mantra of "white supremacist, capitalist patriarchy"; this only begs the question more of why she can't use "heteropatriarchy" or explicitly state how homophobia is just as rampant in this society as other oppressions. Further, hooks has always declared that she adds bibliographies to her books to avoid user-unfriendly footnotes, yet this book cites many books and has no bibliography. I'll still read anything that bell publishes, it's just that this book was not that great.
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
An easy way to get Hooked for the sake of self-esteem!, May 19, 2003
Lest we forget the importance of feeling good about ourselves, bell hooks, the quintessential black feminist writer has added yet another tome to the many outstanding references to the literary canon of African-American culture. Here, she gives us Rock My Soul: Black People and Self-Esteem. No less provocative, but ever so poignant, the panache is intact as she talks with passion on a highly debated topic that is always at the cutting edge of discussion in our communities. There's no book that this author has contributed that doesn't get the overall treatment with candid and insightful analogy. Self esteem and what it means to people of color will always be high profile and a force to be reckoned with due to the scars of slavery and unbalanced scales . Without self-esteem everyone loses his or her sense of meaning, purpose, and power. For too long, African Americans in particular have been unable to openly and honestly address the crisis of self-esteem and how it affects the way they perceive themselves and are perceived by others. In her most challenging and provocative book to date, bell hooks gives voice to what many black people have thought and felt, but seldom articulated in a way where doubt would hold sway. She offers readers a clear, passionate examination of the role of projecting positive images and having the confidence to allow the playing field to be equaled to play in the African-American experience. This is essential in determining whether success is individual or collective. In gathering research for the project, the author delves into the methods and reasons why she used the paradigms to construct this project. She painstakingly listened to the stories of her students, peers, and people from different walks of life and heard the same arguments, including deep feelings of inadequacy and despair. With critical insight and a fervor bent on finding answers, the author exposes the underlying truth behind the crisis. In her estimation, it has been extremely difficult to create a culture that promotes and sustains a healthy sense of self-esteem in African-American communities...and this book gives all the reasons and supportive analogies thereof. What I found interesting and gave me such a positive vein with this book, is how she rigorously examined and identified the barriers -- political and cultural -- that keep African Americans from emotional well-being and a sense of belonging. She looked at historical movements, the role the community plays in this issue, gave introspective analogy why self is just as important at arriving at conclusions, and how the family came to be so involved. She also discusses the revolutionary role preventative mental health care can play in promoting and maintaining self-esteem. The question will always be asked: Why is self-esteem so on the forefront of our societal emanation? This book does quite a bit to understand how racism has been abated, relative to how often-negative reaction to integration has crippled the black community leaving deep psychological scars and extremely low self-esteem as blacks compete by imitating whites. I recommend this book to give compelling arguments and subsequent solutions for a far better understanding of the issue than has been given to us up to now.
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