Princeton professor, author Cornel West is 'Living and Loving Out Loud'

[Blue_Tires]

Cornel West talks a lot about truth — about the need for truth-telling and being true to oneself. For 30 years, the Princeton University professor, recognized as one of the leading intellectuals of his generation, has been on a mission to tell it as he sees it. And the best-selling author and cultural commentator has never been at a loss for subjects: love, justice, politics, race, history, religion.

Now West is telling the truth about himself in an autobiography, “Brother West: Living and Loving Out Loud, A Memoir” (Smiley Books, $25.95). The book, co-written with David Ritz, a biographer and novelist who has collaborated with musicians Marvin Gaye, B.B. King and Etta James, provides an intimate look at the 56-year-old scholar.

For those who know West well, “Living and Loving Out Loud” is an apt description of the man they call “Corn.” His autobiography covers it all: childhood misadventures, brushes with the well-connected and infamous, marriages and affairs, a bout with prostate cancer, his showdown with economics czar Lawrence Summers when Summers was president of Harvard and West one of the school’s best-known professors, and a tough-love friendship with President Barack Obama.

“I have a good time. Every moment, every encounter, every person is a gift to me,” West says, sitting in his Princeton office lined with shelves upon shelves of books. “I think I have lived one of the most blessed lives of the latter part of the 20th century and beginning of the 21st century.”

The Class of 1943 University Professor in Princeton’s Center for African American Studies, West is a popular teacher with a trademark ’70s-era busy Afro and scraggly beard whose lectures usually pack the house.

http://www.nj.com/insidejersey/index.ssf/2009/10/professor_cornel_west.html

[Number23]

1. I LOVE this man! I love him enough to even forgive him for that crappy cameo in The Matrix

Cornel is my dawg. I've adored him for years.

[FrenchieCat]

2. I met him a couple of years ago......

when he came to our church in Oakland, Ca.

He's cool and honest. I Like him a lot! :)