well, as aptly described, it is certainly a comb-bending experience. The book is really to enlighten and impress all the black women and their "hair" experiences. While, anybody can read this good book, you will not be enlightened or feel at home unless you are a black woman. I like to refer to as it as "Good Reminiscing Therapy" that only a black woman can embrace. While, there was many joyful and happy moments, there were many excerpts that was out of contexts . As a Sistah, one thing that I learned was that when you try very hard to make your hair do something that is not agreeable to, you will forever work to get it to obey you. A good walk down memory lane.

Great add to my collection of books about my growing up.

very great stories

This is such a delightful book, I enjoyed reading each page. Some new, some old information and many shared experiences.

it had many stories&anecdotes that i could relate to.there are many pictures included.I would recommend this to any black sister

This is a wonderful book for anyone who would like to explore the issues that Black women face vis a vis our hair from a variety of viewpoints; not just the "politicaly correct" ones.

A wonderful collection of essays that are thought provoking and conversation starting.

....
Black women and their hair -- it's a loaded feminine topic, say Juliette Harris and Pamela Johnson (respectively editor of International Review of African-American Art and a columnist at Essence Magazine), in Tenderheaded, a wise, joyous anthology. All their sisters are "tenderheaded," or sensitive about their hair one way or another. Some could never stand the heat of a curling iron, while others feel their scalps sting at the mere sight of a fine-toothed comb. Others, reading W. E. B. Du Bois' comment that a woman "black or brown and crowned in curled mists" is "the most beautiful thing on earth," pat their own misty crowns and mutter, "mailman's hair: every knot's got its own route."
Reading this anthology feels a little like talking with your girlfriends, grown daughters, or favorite aunts on a lazy afternoon. Now and then a simpatico male drops by--maybe Peter Harris, gloating at finally having learned how to box-braid his six-year-old daughter's curls, or maybe Henry Louis Gates musing on the "kitchen," which isn't just the place at home where your mother and her sisters tended each other's hair but the place at the nape of the neck that's "Unassimilably African" because, says Gates, nothing can "de-kink" it.
Kinks can be a trial in a world where the fluid, silken tress is beauty's trademark. From the Sixties through the Eighties, if a black woman straightened her hair or wore extensions or a weave she was routinely accused of hating herself or insulting her race--the righteous and the rappers loved to diss fake or processed hair. Having naturally straight "good hair" has never been a picnic, either. Even if the "lucky" woman's friends weren't resentful, she missed out on the intimacy and catharsis of hair-wailing sessions, and if she decided on a short style she was said to have thrown her luck away.
Opinions are still divided, and everyone in these pages has a different one, whether the writer is Alice Walker or the great-great-granddaughter of Madam C.J. Walker, America's first black woman millionaire, whose hair care system gave dignified employment to thousands of impoverished women during Jim Crow times. Angela Davis discusses the Afro that made her a media icon, and bell hooks argues that hair-straightening is not about wanting to be white but about longing to grow up--the practice marks the graduation from braided girlhood into womanhood. Art historian Judith Wilson links the pompadours, hair extensions, turbans, and long fingernails popular in some American communities to African aesthetic traditions in which the self is ritually extended through deliberate overabundance and artifice in bodily decoration. Cherilyn Wright, in "If You Let Me Make Love to You, Then Why Can't I Touch Your Hair?" offers the hilarious survey she took among her friends, male and female, about how they handle lovemaking when a hot, damp breath can snap a woman's expensively sleeked hairstyle right back into its original "b-b's."
The book has a marvelous array of photographs, from archive-quality portraits of 19th-century toddlers to Topsy cartoons and Aunt Jemima ads, to Ugandan foreign minister Elizabeth Bagaaya in splendid basket-braids. A New York City matron wears a Muslim head-wrap, and Grace Jones a gorgeous fade. Whoopi Goldberg sports a spoofy yard-long platinum wig.
Best of all, Tenderheaded brings to life the millions of women who give each other their touch and their attention (if sometimes also heartaches or a headache) through the intimate rituals of washing, combing, trimming, oiling, braiding, pressing, winding, wrapping--caring for--each other's hair.