SOURCE: "A Political Homeplace," in Ms., Vol. 1, No. 4, January-February, 1991, pp. 62-3.

In the following review, Walker asserts that "Yearning is about wanting to find health in an ailing community, and doing so through coming to voice, sharing ideas, and healing the whole community."

In these times of increased division and coalition, based on ideology and political consciousness, it is helpful to find a writer who wants to put us all together, but who does not want us to be the same. bell hooks, in her fourth collection of essays, Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics, writes about the need for those of us engaged in what her publishers call "the politics of radical social change," to speak with true voices to one another in order to forge a healthy and spiritually dynamic community.

She proposes that criticism be used as a means for diversity and integration; she suggests...