This book demonstrates once again that Morrison is more than the standard-bearer of American literature. She is our greatest singer. And this book is perhaps her most important song. Close your eyes and make a wish. Wish that one of the most informed, smartest, most successful people in your profession walks into your living room, pulls up a chair and says, 'This is what I’ve been thinking. … That’s The Source of Self-Regard ... the real magic is witnessing [Morrison's] mind and imagination at work. They are as fertile and supple as jazz.

In this collection of nonfiction written over the past four decades, [Morrison] reinforces her status as a piercing and visionary analyst of history, society, literature, language, and, always, race ... [Morrison's] analyses of the role of blackness in the white literary imagination and the limitations placed on black authors are affecting and will be particularly trenchant for those encountering them for the first time ... Where the book explodes into pure brilliance, though, is in Morrison’s comprehensive account of her own writing, from its origins in slave narratives, to its philosophical underpinnings, to its artistic influences ... The meticulous care with which Morrison constructs the prose of her magnificent fiction and elegant nonfiction make the sloppy editing of 'The Source of Self-Regard' that much more distracting. In a collection where so many pieces are occasional, providing the date and occasion of each piece alongside its title would have made reading and comprehension easier ... Yet despite its overflowing content, the book still inspires the desire for more. These pieces were written between 1982 and 2013, but only three in the last decade and none in the four years since Donald Trump declared his candidacy for president.

The book contains exhortations and transcribed question-and-answer sessions, reflections and analyses, exegeses and commencement talks. In other words, it’s a large, rich, heterogeneous book, and hallelujah ... With this book, one is tempted to quote at length from her words: her acuity and moral clarity are dazzling, but so is her vision for how we might find our way towards a less unjust, less hateful future ... one of the keenest pleasures of this book, especially for the many admirers of her fiction, will be the detailed explications of her own writing ... Morrison passes along...courage, in this book as in all her books ... [The Source of Self-Regard] is a bracing reminder of what words do, how carefully they should and can be used.

In short, you can expect virtually every entry in the collection, whether it was written in the 1970s or in this century, to feel strikingly relevant today ... Of course, to highlight every notable observation or intriguing thesis would be to write an entire, if smaller, book itself. There are few pages that don't contain sentences that invite repeated reading, because of their stimulating content, and often because of Morrison's trademark lyricism. Is it a collection worth reading? Undoubtedly ... If there are complaints to be made, they are few. For my part, I would have loved the inclusion of 'Making America White Again,' an essay that appeared in The New Yorker after the 2016 presidential election. I could also imagine that, for some, recurring refrains could have been culled from the collection. (Others, like me, will be less concerned about repetition and will simply appreciate the opportunity to identify trends and preoccupations in Morrison's work.)

There are delightful glimpses into the craft and the care with which she writes ... Some omissions are puzzling — [Morrison's] 2016 essay, 'Making America White Again', for example, should have been included here — some repetitions across the essays are inevitable, and it’s frustrating that the dates and occasion for each piece are at the end, rather than included alongside. But this is a collection that is startling in its relevance to the conflicts and challenges of the present moment ... In a time of turmoil and political greed, [Morrison's] writings have the power to bring, not a false comfort, but the hard-won belief that words can reshape the world. Toni Morrison’s own words certainly have.

...steeped in sharp intelligence and imagination ... This collection of essays and speeches covers a wide variety of topics that resonate with current issues ... starting with a touching eulogy of James Baldwin, Morrison takes a close look at her own work and that of writers and artists.

The Source of Self-Regard would benefit from time stamps with each work’s title ... Morrison’s The Source of Self-Regard wants to test her powers. In her third collection of nonfiction, her fiction, her voice and her power are still very present.

Although we focus, for good reason, on Morrison’s novels, which will endure far into the future as great works of art, her essays opened up new worlds as well: As is seen from the range and depth of moral insight collected in her last book, The Source of Self-​Regard, her essays bequeathed to us a mandate to see and speak clearly, in particular about the ways in which otherness persists in almost every facet of life—a responsibility we need to acknowledge more than ever in the present ... this final book brings Morrison the moral and social critic into view. In her essays, lectures, and reviews, we discover a writer working in a register that many readers may not readily associate with her. Rather than the deft orchestrator of ritual and fable, chronicler of the material and spiritual experience of black girlhood, and master artificer of the vernacular constitution of black communal life, here we encounter Morrison as a dispassionate social theorist and moral anthropologist, someone who offers acute and even scathing readings of America’s contemporary malaise and civic and moral decline in an age defined by the mindless boosterism of laissez-faire capitalism ... In other essays, one finds Morrison venturing bravely into the tense intersections of race, gender, class, and radical politics ... Even as her essays ranged widely, from dissections of feminist politics to the rise of African literature, from extolling the achievements of black women ('you are what fashion tries to be—original and endlessly refreshing') to the parallels between modern and medieval conceptions of violence and conflict in Beowulf, they came together around a set of core concerns about the degradation and coarsening of our politics as we cast one another as others and how this process often manifests itself through language ... the essays included in The Source of Self-Regard, which give their readers little doubt about the power of her insights when she trains her eye on the dismal state of contemporary politics and asks how the rhetoric and experiences of otherness came to be transformed by the rise of new media and global free-market fundamentalism into a potent source of reactionary friction. Despite the fact that some of these essays are now several decades old, Morrison’s insights are still relevant.

One striking thing about these essays is how utterly timely many of them remain. The subjects that Morrison has focused her mighty intellect upon for more than half a century continue to be essential issues ... In an era when complex ideas are reduced to slogans and tweets, when language is dumbed down and truth so often debased, The Source of Self-Regard moves with courage and assurance in the opposite direction. What a gift.

This is not a book to devour. Instead, it’s a book to savor, think about, and reflect on one essay/speech/meditation at a time ... Not to be missed in this bold and thoughtful collection is Morrison’s tribute to Martin Luther King, Jr. ... A slow, careful reading of this book will reveal the deep thinking and philosophical regard for the world that made it possible for Toni Morrison to create such towering literary works as Beloved and Jazz.

This collection of work, spanning four decades, goes on to show just how necessary Morrison is to our literary canon and how illuminating to our society ... Not only do many of Morrison’s pieces ring out truth in much the same way it’s obvious that they do because she’s doing her job as a writer. Every piece answers what the role of what the artist in society should be because she uses her work to analyze, critique, and offer answers for our world ... Reading this collection is to spend time in the mind of someone brilliant.

Proving Morrison to be one of our most incisive cultural critics as well as a creative force, her latest work is a nonfiction collection comprising four decades’ worth of thought on topics as seemingly diverse as feminism, colonization and the colonialist mentality, immigration, and Americanism vs. Africanism ... For readers and aspiring writers alike, Morrison’s willingness to share her sources of inspiration and strategic literary devices while championing the need for the writer’s voice belie her years as a professor, as she touches upon the process of crafting some of her most revered works ... she reminds us that the work of reflection is neverending.

...both dazzlingly heady and deeply personal ... The Source of Self-Regard is also about remembrance—a finely calibrated congregation of memorials ... The Source of Self-Regard excavates Morrison’s vast well of knowledge. Open its pages and receive.

Brilliantly incisive essays, speeches, and meditations considering race, power, identity, and art ... Her latest collection gathers more than 40 pieces (including her Nobel lecture), revealing the passion, compassion, and profound humanity that distinguish her writing ... Powerful, highly compelling pieces from one of our greatest writers.

Some superb pieces headline this rich, if perhaps overstocked, collection of primarily spoken addresses and tributes ... The collection is organized thematically, which is helpful, but because the pieces jump around in time, dates would be a valuable addition to the essay titles ... Nevertheless, this thoughtful anthology makes for often unsettling, and relevant, reading.