bell hooks: The Last Interview is a volume in the Last Interviews series, and an excellent one it is. Glimpses of her thinking at various points throughout her life and career.

While there is enough contextualization if you're familiar with her work this isn't really an introduction. The better you know her work the better the interviews will speak to you. You also need to read with an active, rigorous mindset. Not because she is hard to understand but because she, like always, challenges you. And if you fail to grasp the bigger picture she is painting, you will make the freshman mistake of taking a sentence or comment out of context, like about Anita Hill or the Rodney King uprising.

hooks refused to allow her readers, or listeners if you were ever fortunate enough to watch her speak, take the easy way out or around people or situations that needed to have their problematic aspects analyzed, the examples in the previous paragraph being perfect examples. One can do a kneejerk dismissal and simply refuse to engage with the overlapping systems at work or take their unease at some comments and examine what hooks is actually getting at. Many take the easy way, which saves them looking closely at either their cultural heroes or themselves.

Having taught both her works and her ideas, I can see where using parts of this book would fit nicely with the specific works they reference. Rather than having to find copies of the interviews elsewhere, they are collected and ready to use. Between the primary readings and these interviews, classroom discussion should be energetic and productive.

Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via NetGalley. ( )