Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

It’s All We Need

All About Love: New Visions by bell hooks

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bell hooks’ The Will to Change wasn’t just a good book in a sense that books can be quantified in such a manner. It was one that shifted my paradigm and also affirmed me in so many ways. As lauded as that one is, All About Love is considered her seminal text and is, to borrow a phrase from current parlance, having a moment. It’s been largely reissued and reintroduced to a new generation of readers. Once I got over what I wanted it to be and appreciated it […]

all about love

all about love by bell hooks

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I loved these essays by bell hooks. She passed away last year and I am sad to say that this is my first reading of her works. I have heard of her, and read different pieces of her writing before, but never sat down and read one of her collections. The anthropologist in me loves how she brings up the different aspects of love and ties it into different things in our lives and often shows us that we have gotten here by the environment […]

Giving Me the Feelings I Express

The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love by bell hooks

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I had a great professor in Seminary who I felt came up short in one regard. She taught our Spiritual Care class and in her lecture on masculinity, she had us watch a video of a movie, the title of which I can’t remember. In it, a deadbeat dad played by (I think) Nick Nolte is depicted in a scene as being unable to relate to his young daughter and getting angry at her when she suggests she wants to see her mother. I cannot […]

In the weeks before the English Department at Oberlin College was about to decide whether or not I would be granted tenure, I was haunted by dreams of running away–of disappearing–yes, even on dying.

Teaching to Transgress by bell hooks

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This is an orientation book, not a praxis one — not really. Thinking on the title alone, the grammar of “Teaching to Transgress” whether teaching is a used as a gerund form “Teaching” or as a participial form or simply both matters, and so the dual nature of how you can read the title of the book was curious to me. This book also clearly reminded me how far behind practical, everyday conversations, especially online are from transformative theory in academic settings are. The book […]

Every female wants to be loved by a male.

The Will to Change by bell hooks

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Out of context, that opening line is a little jarring. Ultimately, using the broadest definitions of culture (and of course later recognizing her limits and failures in relation to gender and sex), bell hooks is arguing the impracticality of complete separation of men and women, boys and girls, and any other combination of relations in modern US culture. While adults do have a real opportunity to seek those separate spaces, most people won’t choose this course and plenty simply can’t, especially children and also men […]

The rhetoric of feminism with its emphasis on resistance, rebellion, and revolution created an illusion of militancy and radicalism…

Ain't I a Woman by bell hooks

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…that masked the fact that feminism was in no way a challenge or a threat to capitalist patriarchy. This is among the concluding statements to bell hooks’s 1981 text Ain’t I a Woman, which takes the question asked by Sojourner Truth in front of a group of white feminists in 1851. By asking this question, but also coupling that question with specific evidence based in ontological thinking as opposed of prescriptive or descriptive discussions of attributes, qualities, and behaviors (that is: being a woman as a […]



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