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bell hooks, who teaches English at New York's City College, is well-known as an abrasive, take-no-prisoners feminist cultural critic. In this moving memoir of her childhood she explains the roots of her forceful and rigorous attitude to life and literature. She grew up in a poor Southern black family, an heir to poverty and racism, surrounded by people too wrapped up in their own struggles to offer much help to her. She writes here of her mother's suffering in an abusive marriage, of her siblings' rejection of her for being "different," of her own painful discovery of sexuality, and of how she found escape through books. [via]