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27 of 28 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Towards a Just Society, April 4, 2005
This review is from: Where We Stand: Class Matters (Paperback)
I recommend this book. This is the first bell hooks I have read, and was deeply impressed by her clear, rooted moral position on the state of American and global society. Her writing in this piece shifts from a narrative of her own history growing up in the South, to a present academic, political critique of today.
I found her writing fluid and her point of view significant. As a black woman in America and someone who has experienced lower and upper class existence and the according journey between them, her perspective is complex, making her voice deep and necessary.
In no way can I specify difference with this book. She calls for a morally just society, which denounces the consumerism that perpetuates exploitation, racism, sexism while it is advertised and fantasized about as a life pursuit. Seeing the current issue of Newsweek's cover story, titled "How to Win," regarding a CEO's expertise in making money and succeeding the "American way," immediately brought Where We Stand into consideration.
This book is a call to action, and an illumination of the depressing and unjust, cruel and foolish system which ignores and is afraid of reforming itself enough to allow for "a world where we can all have enough to live fully and well."
I particularly appreciated her chapters on living simply, and think it is an appropriate and bold call to make in a place where stuff and acquisition are social symbols of significance.
To conclude, I found this description of class from page 103, by Rita Mae Brown, to be important: "Class is much more than Marx's definition of relationship to the means of production. Class involves behavior, your basic assumptions, how you are taught to behave, what you expect from yourself and from others, your concept of a future, how you understand problems and solve them, how you think, feel, act."
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25 of 29 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Review on bell hooks Where We Stand, May 8, 2001
This review is from: Where We Stand: Class Matters (Paperback)
Reading bell hooks, Where We Stand, was a challenge in itself. I had never thought of myself as being racist or having strong bias against any one group of people, but I did find myself getting angry with some of the things that she wrote about. I thought in the beginning that she painted a very sad harsh picture of her life growing up, and the trials she had to go through to get where she wanted to be. They were long and hard days, but she did get there. What I was most frustrated with was her repetitive nature. It was almost like she was going to make sure we GOT IT! I just think that when someone is on a soapbox about something they beat the subject matter into their audience's head until it is no longer interesting. I found myself becoming defensive about things. I got frustrated with her at times, but then I read on and began to see the injustices that were out there. Making it unfair in many different ways for blacks. I particularly felt strong about a chapter dealing with real estate, and how it is manipulated by "desirables" to keep "the undesirables" out. It is sad to think that you can put a dollar amount on the color of a person's skin. I felt ashamed at times, thinking the same things perhaps at one time or another. This reading has helped me grow as a person and it opened me up to the ways of the world. At least I hope that it has. I suggest that everyone takes a look, it will be worth it.
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22 of 28 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
or 4.95 . . ., January 5, 2001
This review is from: Where We Stand: Class Matters (Paperback)
bell hooks is ahead of the curve again. Class studies seems sure to supersede race and gender studies as the next big thing in academia (and thus, eventually, more widely--at least I hope so). Hooks writes wonderfully here and elsewhere about issues that most academics write about in prose that is certainly more difficult than necessary. As before, at least for me, she's at her best here when she writes about the details of her own life, her own growing class awareness. In doing so, she manages to show just how much American consciousness has changed regarding the poor and the rich, and especially, how individuals decide where they "stand" in relation to the two. Getting rich has become the highest goal in America, even more so than it ever was, and the poor are more disregarded and even despised than ever. hooks reminds us (and, hopefully, the newly triumphant Christian right) that the Bible, and much traditional Christian teaching, holds the poor up, rather than the rich, as examples of how we all should live. A shift in perspective has gradually crept upon us--while Americans used to cite many features that constituted a "good life," loads of money has come to the fore as the defining tool toward living "well," and for many it seems to be the only thing that would make life better. hooks writes "movingly" (a cliche, but it's true) of how all these changes FEEL; she clarifies for me, for instance, the way the widening availability of gambling is making more and more of us dissatisfied with our current lives because they seem to pale so in comparison to the lives we "could" lead if we could just buy that right lottery ticket. I could write much more encouraging you to read this book, but I'll end by applauding how fully hooks shows that class AND race AND gender continue to be factors that must be considered together if we are to make any progress toward narrowing the gap between the rich and the poor. Assuming we see such a gap, and even want to narrow it. With the increasingly meaner winds blowing, issues of class will probably get brushed aside even more roughly by the American fantasy of class mobility for ANYone willing and able to work for it--thank you, bell hooks, for standing up and talking back to that wind.
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