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Customer Reviews of Where We Stand; Class Matters

Book encourages reflection on recent events
I started reading this book shortly before Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast and news clips began pouring in from New Orleans. More clearly than ever, I understood the need for books like Where We Stand to encourage us to think about issues of class in America and then take action in our own lives. <
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>I read bell hooks because she challenges the notions I have from my white supremacist, patriarchal, capitalist upbringing. Where We Stand continues in this tradition. While reflecting upon the events of her own life and her own actions, hooks is able to examine our culture while inviting us increase awareness of how issues of class impact our own lives. For example, while critically examining the influence of materialism in our society, hooks offers her own personal experience with owning a BMW and how her attitude toward the vehicle subtly affected her relationships with other people. <
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>Anyone willing to examine how class, race, gender, and consumerism all collide will want to read this book.

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Towards a Just Society
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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thanks bell hooks!
Thanks bell hooks! I have never read a book that explained so clearly the feelings I've had growing up in a working class family and the struggles I've endured (even as a white girl). I sensed bell hooks compassion and spirituality throughout this book. I only wish that our political leaders and our religious leaders would take time to read it.