bell hooks confronts. Her 1990 essay collection, Yearning: race, gender, and cultural politics, faces issues, addresses pain, and interrogates (as she likes to say) convention. Her book deals with a constellation of questions affecting “marginalized” individuals and communities and takes on issues of perception, domination, decolonization, defiance, oppressive boundaries, otherness, and setting of agendas, which together provide intellectual armament to deploy against efforts to “re-inscribe white supremacy” and defend patriarchy. She finds in her subjects, which range from feminism to art to media narratives to racism and more, currents against which resistance is vital or for which support proves a critical act.

The messages ms. hooks offers are often uncomfortable. Those who feel discomfort could include any persons (including some feminists and especially defensive white males) who have bestirred themselves enough to read her counter-hegemonic meditations on color, feminism, and status. There is no shyness here, no temporizing, not a bit of timidity.

If, like me, you wince at jargon (such as “counter-hegemonic”), don’t turn away. I suggest, instead, beginning with the piece “Aesthetic Inheritances: history worked by hand,” where ms. hooks writes of her grandmother’s quiltmaking. Then, fortified by that loving portrait, return to page one to start on a challenging tour of politics, gender, and race, a tour conducted in what the author calls “academic theoretical language.” It’s not the most congenial of argots and risks blighting what is worth saying, but there are insights to be had from her theoretic explorations and these sometimes are seasoned by writing that will help mollify readers hoping for concrete, individualized details. For fans of cinema expressing social concerns, her movie critiques bring out novel perspectives. The book closes with chapters cast in a self-interview format, bringing us that little bit nearer the author.

bell hooks finds in Yearning occasion to analyze things from angles I hadn’t. Not every such angle is instructive but some are forcefully so. It can take perseverance in those not flattered by her messages to get through this volume. I say, try. ( )