Breaking Bread

Insurgent Black Intellectual Life

In this provocative and captivating dialogue, bell hooks and Cornel West come together to discuss the dilemmas, contradictions, and joys of Black intellectual life. The two friends and comrades in struggle talk, argue, and disagree about everything from community to capitalism in a series of intimate conversations that range from playful to probing to revelatory. In evoking the act of breaking bread, the book calls upon the various traditions of sharing that take place in domestic, secular, and sacred life where people come together to give themselves, to nurture life, to renew their spirits, sustain their hopes, and to make a lived politics of revolutionary struggle an ongoing practice.

This twenty-fifth anniversary edition continues the dialogue with "In Solidarity," their 2016 conversation at the bell hooks Institute on racism, politics, popular culture, and the contemporary Black experience.

©2017 Gloria Watkins and Cornel West (P)2023 Tantor

Must hear

No reason to not be informed in this day and age!I learned things from this book that I should have already known.

Great content, not so great presentation

I loved hearing the dynamic between West and Hook. I'm drawn in by their ideas, especially where they disagree. But it is a read transcript, not a recording. So, despite a skilled reader, nothing about this is as good as it could have been if we had simply had the recording of the interlocutors in their own voices. Even if the recording was poor.