It took me about a year to read this book - not anything to do with the book itself, just my lack of time. but i am glad it took so long as the last few chapters came at a time just when i needed them. they are about crossing class divides and redistributing wealth, which coincided with me finishing a lifetime of study and starting a salaried job. it was reassuring to read that the things I'd been feeling weren't unique and that others before me have crossed those boundaries and prioritise wealt...

Though I liked this for the most part and found hooks' personal narrative fascinating, I found Chapter 7, entitled "The Me-Me Class: The Young and the Ruthless" to be just another run-of-the-mill old person complaining about the young, for example:"In part, youth culture's worship of wealth stems from the fact that it is easier to acquire money and goods than it is to find meaningful values and ethics, to know who you are and what you want to become, to make and sustain and friends, to know love...

my first time reading bell hooks and i liked it a lot!some of the essays were better than others and more interesting but ig thinking that is probably normal for essay collections

a book that pretends to be an academic account of class in the united states as well as a study of class within the american society. however the book is nothing more than conjecture and personal accounting more than it is research and study. there is more rhetoric in this book than in any cornell west book i have ever read, which i thought would be hard to surpass, and which further separates the author from any academic rating with ethereal and undefined terms such as "a just society" and "jus...

Rereading as research. Remembering why I love bell hooks.

"The call to live simply is not new news. It was a beacon light only a few years ago. And many of us embraced and remain faithful to communitarian values. Nothing threatens those values more than turning the poor into a predatory class to be both despised and feared..." (p. 48)."Without education for critical consciousness that begins when children are entering the world of consumer capitalism, there will never be a set of basic values that can ward off the politics of predatory greed" (p. 88)."...

With bell hooks I am always excited when I like something of hers more than I liked the last thing I read by her. She really just knows how to nail it.

Add bell hooks to my list of favorite authors. Her assessment of American class hierarchy is spot on. And while I don’t necessarily agree with all of her countermeasures, I don’t take umbrage with them either. 4 big stars.

This may be one of the most frustrating books I’ve read in a long time. I was eager to read this as bell hooks is one of my favorite authors and the topic of class hits close to home, but this was just awful. hooks makes grand postulations throughout the entire text with pretty much no data citations (I’m not exaggerating. Data is seemingly not necessary or inconsequential even though the author is making broad claims about the U.S. population at large). I’m not saying everything needed data, bu...

I confess I was looking forward to this like chocolate cake, been a bit blue lately, feeling all out of place in that way you do when you come from dirt poor and somehow end up doing a PhD, because in the academic 'us' and 'them', you know you come from the 'them' and proud of it to. And so you get that wtf am I doing feeling and I confess I read this not looking for answers everyone has to struggle for on their own, but a little solace and shared understanding. And I did find that, so much ring...

Her anger is palpable at times. It's a great book to begin to unpack your relationship to consumerism.

Unfortunately, the incisive analyses of bell hooks' earlier books are replaced in this one by cliched, simplistic and repetitive statements and digressive personal narratives. I recommend this to readers who haven't given much thought to class and to its relationship to race in the US, but otherwise you're better off with the essays on class in her earlier collections (try Yearning or Killing Rage).

bell hooks shares her upbringing and personal history with us in this book, and for that reason it is worth savoring. She has a very conversational style in this book; she is not writing a polemic. But she is teaching. This book reminds us that America does indeed have a class hierarchy, and indicates how that plays out for citizens. hooks reminds us that in a culture where money is the measure of value, it is believed that everything and everybody can be bought. But money is not the standard wh...

bell hooks makes a lot of important points and connections in these essays on class, as well as on the intersections between class, race, and gender. However, I found it rather repetitive; since each chapter was apparently written as a separate essay it felt as if the same thing was said many times through-out the different essays. Within each essay, I sometimes felt that the writing meandered and it was difficult to follow the train of thought at times. This was my first book by bell hooks and

Raw, honest, incisive social commentary supplemented with rich autobiographical details as hooks explores and shares her experiences and the subtle influences of class on a poor, black woman growing up in a nominally classless society. Hooks chooses this approach partly because she does not have the economic vocabulary to discuss the concept academically. But doing so would miss the point she is trying to make which is that class is not discussed in the Academy nor in the public square since in

I really loved this book – but I have enjoyed all of her books so far. Class is a particularly interesting subject for someone like hooks to tackle, as being both black and female means that there are really good reasons why she might not want to talk about class at all. It isn’t just Marx that says that class issues are key to fundamentally changing society, but even someone like Luhmann also claims that all other forms of disadvantage can be overcome without fundamentally changing society – bu...

In this book, hooks recalls growing up poor and black in the American south. She says that it was perfectly fine to discuss race and to blame it for all problems financial, but it was never polite or acceptable to talk about money or the lack thereof. Class, too, was not in this group of people’s lexicon.Even though they were poor, her family still managed to maintain a patriarchal household. Her mother did not work until the children were all teenagers, and of course her jobs only mimicked her

A powerful collection of essays about how “class is about much more than money”. bell hooks argues that class is most often used as an excuse for justifying racial and gender inequities yet least spoken about with regards to mobility. Each essay left me with lots to chew on and think about “where I stand” as bell hooks puts it. How can I think about distributing resources available to me and use my class power to advocate and elevate those without it?Bell hooks describes her upbringing in the wo...

bell hooks sets up a slow burn in this treatise on the ignored intersectional role that class plays in "classless" America. Blending her own experiences with academic scholarship, she creates a view of the melding of class, race, gender, and wealth that is at times uncomfortable to confront, but always compelling. Even though it was written almost 20 years ago, her points are painfully relevant to today's society. The housing crisis of 2009, for example, she basically predicted in her discussion...

I found Bell Hooks to be extremely repetitive and come across as angry more than analytical. While pushing for equality in racial classes, she seemed to be spiteful towards the people of color who had become successful and gained any sort of wealth. I would be curious to seek her opinion about Barak Obama and what it means for us to have a black president. It seems that she thinks those blacks who have risen to financial wealth have somehow betrayed the solidarity of the black cause. I became fu...