As a devoted fan of bell hooks, I was very excited to read this book. I’ve always found her to be an extremely sharp critic of culture, and I’ve appreciated her ability to state her thoughts clearly and compellingly. This volume was no exception. hooks engages with a wide variety of problems and approaches to “education as the practice of freedom.” Her essays exposed the degree to which our traditional system of education reproduces and sustains structural inequalities. Equally important, these essays offered new ways of thinking about pedagogy, and new strategies for creating a liberatory classroom. The only major downfall I saw in this volume is that the essays often repeated themselves. hooks acknowledges as much in her introduction, saying that since she wrote each essay separately, a certain degree of overlap exists in the collection. I would perhaps recommend that readers space out the essays rather than attempting to digest them all at once; this will allow readers to digest her thoughts before moving on, and will help them avoid becoming frustrated by these overlaps. hooks states that she intends these essays to be “celebratory” (10), and indeed I found that the experience of reading them was often a joyful one. The degree to which she loves teaching and connects with her students is incredibly inspiring. Teaching to Transgress has earned a permanent place on my bookshelf; I anticipate that I will turn to it often as I begin to teach students and create my own pedagogical style.

Intro: Teaching to Transgress bell hooks ushers the reader into her collection of essays with a description of the various pedagogies that informed her own education. First, she presents us with the exciting, enlivened learning environment which she experienced as a young girl in an all-black school. She attributes this excitement at least in part to the fact