"bell hooks's unique contribution to intellectual life, American letters and Black thought," writes Cornel West in his collaboration with bell hooks, Breaking Bread: Insurgent Black Intellectual Life (1991), "is that of producing a challenging corpus of work which proposes a singular human struggle to be candid about one's self and contestatory toward the dehumanizing forces in our world." Indeed, hooks has spent her career deconstructing the multiple systems of oppression that socially malign the character of African American people in general and African American women in particular. A prolific writer and celebrated public speaker, hooks is a committed feminist and an astute critical thinker. Her distinctive blend of rigorous intellectual sensibility, coupled with an often painfully intense personal scrutiny, has gained her widespread recognition as a social activist and cultural theorist. hooks's political agenda is simple: the disempowered, the disenfranchised, the unspoken for, and the overlooked must find ways...