bell hooks, who teaches English at New York's City College, is well-known as an abrasive, take-no-prisoners feminist cultural critic. In this moving memoir of her childhood she explains the roots of her forceful and rigorous attitude to life and literature. She grew up in a poor Southern black family, an heir to poverty and racism, surrounded by people too wrapped up in their own struggles to offer much help to her. She writes here of her mother's suffering in an abusive marriage, of her siblings' rejection of her for being "different," of her own painful discovery of sexuality, and of how she found escape through books.


From Publishers Weekly
Just as hooks, author of several books on issues of race and sex (Killing Rage, etc.) has idiosyncratically taken a lower-case name, her memoir, written in imagistic three-page segments, takes an unconventional approach. Aiming "to conjure a rich magical world of southern black culture," she avoids conventional signifiers like place names and dates and even shifts between a first-person and a third-person voice, referring to herself as "she." Add such techniques to simple, present-tense syntax, and the results can sound precious at times. Still, hooks is right to declare that "[n]ot enough is known about the experience of black girls in our society," so her effort deserves close reading. She struggles with a toy Barbie, preferring a brown doll. She finds sustenance in a rich black community?though one grandmother hates dark skin. She turns to religion and she loves the library. Her mother and older sister treat her menarche with more scorn than sympathy, but she discovers on her own the private pleasure of sexuality. There are scenes of the growing young woman learning about jazz, developing a crush, seeing her parents fight, finding one white teacher who seems unafraid of black kids. In the end, this book leaves us with a familiar but not unsatisfying image, that of a sensitive youth finding in books deliverance from "the wilderness of spirit I am living in." Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From School Library Journal
YA. This treasure box of memories presents 61 snapshot vignettes of two-to-three pages in length of the author growing up in a southern town as an African-American rebel in a family of six girls and one boy. Memories flow chronologically and reveal hooks's growing awareness of the world around her and her role in it. She fits these experiences, dreams, and fantasies together to help explain how she came to be the writer and woman she is today. Sometimes these episodes are told in the first person, sometimes indirectly by a third person to give them distance and objectivity. Hooks grew up poor without realizing her poverty and yet she had rich experiences and many warm, loving adults around her to help balance the abuse she occasionally incurred from others. Her intense insight into everyday experiences elicits universal acknowledgment. She shares experiences of wash day, caring for an elderly woman with palsy, rescuing discarded books, listening to jazz, attending integrated schools for the first time, coping with feelings of loneliness, and encountering reaction to biracial relationships. She learns about child cruelty, country churches and salvation, sexuality, masturbation, homosexuality, and dirty books. Each chapter carries her life forward, revealing another experience or memory. A unique autobiography of a contemporary African-American woman that should find a place in all collections.?Dottie Kraft, formerly at Fairfax County Public Schools, VACopyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
Hooks (Killing Rage, LJ 7/95), who teaches English at City College in New York, reveals her family secrets and her struggle to belong in this "unconventional" memoir of girlhood. Moving from the first to the third person in beautifully rendered short chapters quite unlike her scholarly work, hooks speaks of her mother's unhappy, abusive marriage; her siblings' disdain for her; her spiritual upbringing; and her discovery of sexuality. She grew up poor in the rural South, where she and her five sisters and brother came face to face with racism when they were forced to attend a white school in the name of integration. Hooks became interested in books at an early age, sometimes sneaking to read her father's pornographic materials, but her mother disapproved of her reading so much. Nevertheless, her reading tastes grew, from books on sex to books by George Eliot and Charlotte Bronte to popular romances, which gave her the sense of "escape, release, a feeling of satisfaction, a belief in the possibility of self-recovery," and the urge to be a writer herself. A sad tale of childhood memories but a winner; highly recommended.-?Ann Burns, "Library Journal"Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.


Library Journal, Ann Burns
A sad tale of childhood memories but a winner; highly recommended.


From Booklist
Ardent, questioning, and rigorous, hooks is a formidable feminist social and cultural critic. One has to wonder about the source of her forcefulness and candor, and that is exactly what hooks reveals in this lyrical, deeply moving, and brilliantly structured autobiography of "perceptions and ideas." As utterly compelling as the hard facts of her young life as the "problem child" in a tightly run, cash-poor southern household are, it is hooks' ability to articulate the sharp, unrelenting anguish of her young self, and her struggle to find comfort and inspiration in books, that elevates her story from simple memoir to a resonant and richly metaphoric portrait of a mind, a soul. As hooks recalls people she feared and those she loved--particularly her family's wise and loving elders--and captures the emotional timbre of pivotal events, she projects the gravity of certain truths: of just how painful it is to be different, how rooted and unjust sexism and racism are, how confounding sexuality can be, and how thorny love is. hooks' exquisite prose, forged in the heat of inner fires, glows like obsidian. Donna Seaman


From Kirkus Reviews
Quite a departure from her usual work, this slender memoir allows African-American feminist writer hooks (Killing Rage, 1995, etc.) to look back on her childhood. Although hooks has always drawn very effectively on her past in her trenchant social and political essays, this book is the first of her works to deal at length with what it was like growing up black in the South in the 1950s. It is also, she writes, about her struggle to create a self and an ``identity distinct from and yet inclusive of the world around me . . . a rich magical world of southern black culture that was sometimes paradisiacal and at other times terrifying.'' Telling her story in brief vignettes, hooks illuminates each of the elements that composed that world, describing her parents, torn, sometimes to the point of violence, by the pressures that married life brings; an extended family that provided her with room to dream at the same time that it fed her a range of conflicting cues about how to live; a black subculture that instilled a series of painful lessons in color-driven self-evaluation; and finally, a white majority culture that could offer both the benefits of literature and the punishments of racial discrimination. As a child hooks was a loner, a little girl who loved books but who possessed ``too much spirit'' to suit her father. Fortunately, her extended family offered her many female role models: Grandmothers, aunts, and others helped prepare her for life in a harsh world. Alternating between first- and third-person narratives, Bone Black is as much about deciphering the secret languages and sign systems of adulthood, about learning how the larger world works, as it is about creating one's identity. The narrative voice is oddly disembodied, somehow disturbingly disengaged; there are moments of real force and pain here, but they are not sustained. A book of great intelligence, Bone Black's power is somewhat diffused by this reticence of tone. -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.


Review
“Bone Black is a lucid, challenging, and entrancing read.”—The Washington Post Book World

“With the emotion of poetry, the narrative of a novel, and the truth of experience, Bell Hooks weaves a girlhood memoir you won’t be able to put down—or forget. Bone Black takes us into the cave of self-creation.”—Gloria Steinem

“A canvas of vividly impressionistic splashes of growing up young, gifted, black, and female.”—The Philadelphia Inquirer



Review
“Bone Black is a lucid, challenging, and entrancing read.”—The Washington Post Book World

“With the emotion of poetry, the narrative of a novel, and the truth of experience, Bell Hooks weaves a girlhood memoir you won’t be able to put down—or forget. Bone Black takes us into the cave of self-creation.”—Gloria Steinem

“A canvas of vividly impressionistic splashes of growing up young, gifted, black, and female.”—The Philadelphia Inquirer



Book Description
Stitching together girlhood memories with the finest threads of innocence, feminist intellectual bell hooks presents a powerfully intimate account of growing up in the South. A memoir of ideas and perceptions, Bone Black shows the unfolding of female creativity and one strong-spirited child’s journey toward becoming a writer. She learns early on the roles women and men play in society, as well as the emotional vulnerability of children. She sheds new light on a society that beholds the joys of marriage for men and condemns anything more than silence for women. In this world, too, black is a woman’s color—worn when earned—daughters and daddies are strangers under the same roof, and crying children are often given something to cry about. hooks finds good company in solitude, good company in books. She also discovers, in the motionless body of misunderstanding, that writing is her most vital breath.



About the Author
bell hooks is the author of several books, including Killing Rage, Bone Black, and Wounds of Passion. She is Distinguished Professor of English at City College in New York and lives in New York City.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

A memoir of ideas and perceptions, Bone Back shows the unfolding of female creativity and one strong-spirited child's journey toward becoming a writer. She learns early on the roles women and men play in society, as well as the impotence of children, especially black female children. She sheds new light on a society that beholds the joys of marriage for men and condemns anything more than silence for women. In this world, too, black is a woman's color - worn when earned - daughters and daddy are strangers under the same roof, and crying children are often given something to cry about. In school, hooks sees that integration most resembles corralling, with black children herded, prodded, and pushed like cattle. And the learning agenda is to teach these children to forget their history and the injustices done to them and to embrace the ways of white folk. hooks finds comfort in solitude, good company in books. She also discovers, in the motionless body of misunderstanding, that writing is the most vital breath. She is taught by an elder that quilting is the way a woman learns patience. And hooks's patience, coupled with the insight and bravery that readers have come to expect from her, is rewarded with the strength to keep in touch with the wounded parts of herself and to grow beyond the scars by stretching the confines of history, tradition, and family to encompass her expansive spirit.

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly

Just as hooks, author of several books on issues of race and sex (Killing Rage, etc.) has idiosyncratically taken a lower-case name, her memoir, written in imagistic three-page segments, takes an unconventional approach. Aiming "to conjure a rich magical world of southern black culture," she avoids conventional signifiers like place names and dates and even shifts between a first-person and a third-person voice, referring to herself as "she." Add such techniques to simple, present-tense syntax, and the results can sound precious at times. Still, hooks is right to declare that "[n]ot enough is known about the experience of black girls in our society," so her effort deserves close reading. She struggles with a toy Barbie, preferring a brown doll. She finds sustenance in a rich black communitythough one grandmother hates dark skin. She turns to religion and she loves the library. Her mother and older sister treat her menarche with more scorn than sympathy, but she discovers on her own the private pleasure of sexuality. There are scenes of the growing young woman learning about jazz, developing a crush, seeing her parents fight, finding one white teacher who seems unafraid of black kids. In the end, this book leaves us with a familiar but not unsatisfying image, that of a sensitive youth finding in books deliverance from "the wilderness of spirit I am living in." (Oct.)

Library Journal

Hooks (Killing Rage, LJ 7/95), who teaches English at City College in New York, reveals her family secrets and her struggle to belong in this "unconventional" memoir of girlhood. Moving from the first to the third person in beautifully rendered short chapters quite unlike her scholarly work, hooks speaks of her mother's unhappy, abusive marriage; her siblings' disdain for her; her spiritual upbringing; and her discovery of sexuality. She grew up poor in the rural South, where she and her five sisters and brother came face to face with racism when they were forced to attend a white school in the name of integration. Hooks became interested in books at an early age, sometimes sneaking to read her father's pornographic materials, but her mother disapproved of her reading so much. Nevertheless, her reading tastes grew, from books on sex to books by George Eliot and Charlotte Bront to popular romances, which gave her the sense of "escape, release, a feeling of satisfaction, a belief in the possibility of self-recovery," and the urge to be a writer herself. A sad tale of childhood memories but a winner; highly recommended. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 5/1/96.]Ann Burns, "Library Journal"

School Library Journal

YAThis treasure box of memories presents 61 snapshot vignettes of two-to-three pages in length of the author growing up in a southern town as an African-American rebel in a family of six girls and one boy. Memories flow chronologically and reveal hooks's growing awareness of the world around her and her role in it. She fits these experiences, dreams, and fantasies together to help explain how she came to be the writer and woman she is today. Sometimes these episodes are told in the first person, sometimes indirectly by a third person to give them distance and objectivity. Hooks grew up poor without realizing her poverty and yet she had rich experiences and many warm, loving adults around her to help balance the abuse she occasionally incurred from others. Her intense insight into everyday experiences elicits universal acknowledgment. She shares experiences of wash day, caring for an elderly woman with palsy, rescuing discarded books, listening to jazz, attending integrated schools for the first time, coping with feelings of loneliness, and encountering reaction to biracial relationships. She learns about child cruelty, country churches and salvation, sexuality, masturbation, homosexuality, and dirty books. Each chapter carries her life forward, revealing another experience or memory. A unique autobiography of a contemporary African-American woman that should find a place in all collections.Dottie Kraft, formerly at Fairfax County Public Schools, VA

Kirkus Reviews

Quite a departure from her usual work, this slender memoir allows African-American feminist writer hooks (Killing Rage, 1995, etc.) to look back on her childhood.

Although hooks has always drawn very effectively on her past in her trenchant social and political essays, this book is the first of her works to deal at length with what it was like growing up black in the South in the 1950s. It is also, she writes, about her struggle to create a self and an "identity distinct from and yet inclusive of the world around me . . . a rich magical world of southern black culture that was sometimes paradisiacal and at other times terrifying." Telling her story in brief vignettes, hooks illuminates each of the elements that composed that world, describing her parents, torn, sometimes to the point of violence, by the pressures that married life brings; an extended family that provided her with room to dream at the same time that it fed her a range of conflicting cues about how to live; a black subculture that instilled a series of painful lessons in color-driven self-evaluation; and finally, a white majority culture that could offer both the benefits of literature and the punishments of racial discrimination. As a child hooks was a loner, a little girl who loved books but who possessed "too much spirit" to suit her father. Fortunately, her extended family offered her many female role models: Grandmothers, aunts, and others helped prepare her for life in a harsh world. Alternating between first- and third-person narratives, Bone Black is as much about deciphering the secret languages and sign systems of adulthood, about learning how the larger world works, as it is about creating one's identity.

The narrative voice is oddly disembodied, somehow disturbingly disengaged; there are moments of real force and pain here, but they are not sustained. A book of great intelligence, Bone Black's power is somewhat diffused by this reticence of tone.