All About Love
New Visions
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4.4 • 56 Ratings
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- £6.99
Publisher Description
A New York Times bestseller and enduring classic, All About Love is the acclaimed first volume in feminist icon bell hooks' "Love Song to the Nation" trilogy. All About Love reveals what causes a polarized society, and how to heal the divisions that cause suffering. Here is the truth about love, and inspiration to help us instill caring, compassion, and strength in our homes, schools, and workplaces.
“The word ‘love’ is most often defined as a noun, yet we would all love better if we used it as a verb,” writes bell hooks as she comes out fighting and on fire in All About Love. Here, at her most provocative and intensely personal, renowned scholar, cultural critic and feminist bell hooks offers a proactive new ethic for a society bereft with lovelessness--not the lack of romance, but the lack of care, compassion, and unity. People are divided, she declares, by society’s failure to provide a model for learning to love.
As bell hooks uses her incisive mind to explore the question “What is love?” her answers strike at both the mind and heart. Razing the cultural paradigm that the ideal love is infused with sex and desire, she provides a new path to love that is sacred, redemptive, and healing for individuals and for a nation. The Utne Reader declared bell hooks one of the “100 Visionaries Who Can Change Your Life.” All About Love is a powerful, timely affirmation of just how profoundly her revelations can change hearts and minds for the better.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
In bell hooks’ prolific career as a poet and scholar, her 2000 book All About Love stands alone. In it, hooks deconstructs the topic of love from a philosophical and psychological viewpoint, distilling insights from both weighty academic papers and popular self-help books. It’s also a memoir of sorts. She had just emerged from a string of failed relationships, and she’s deep in her feelings as she incorporates her experiences into the book. She also adds a critical overview of ’90s pop culture, with lengthy passages about figures like Nicole Brown Simpson and Monica Lewinsky, as well as the decade’s odd obsession with the concept of angels. When hooks expertly weaves all these threads together, the result is a brilliant mix of deeply personal revelations and incisive theory. We’re still thinking about her suggestion that love is an act of will rather than a “feeling.” This is a book you’ll read over and over, finding something new each time.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Taking on yet another popular topic in her role as cultural critic, hooks blends the personal and the psychological with the philosophical in her latest book--a thoughtful but frequently familiar examination of love American style. A distinguished professor of English at City College in New York City, she explains her sense of urgency about confronting a subject that countless writers have analyzed: "I feel our nation's turning away from love as intensely as I felt love's abandonment in my girlhood. Turning away, we risk moving in a wilderness of spirit so intense we may never find our way home again." With an engaging narrative style, hooks presents a series of possible ways to reverse what she sees as the emotional and cultural fallout caused by flawed visions of love largely defined by men who have been socialized to distrust its value and power. She proposes a transformative love based on affection, respect, recognition, commitment, trust and care, rather than the customary forms stemming from gender stereotypes, domination, control, ego and aggression. However, many of her insights about self-love, forgiveness, compassion and openness have been explored in greater depth by the legion of writers hooks quotes liberally throughout the book, such as John Bradshaw, Lucia Hodgson, Thich Nhat Hanh, Thomas Merton and M. Scott Peck, among others. Still, every page offers useful nuggets of wisdom to aid the reader in overcoming the fears of total intimacy and of loss. Although the chapter on angels comes across as filler, hooks's view of amour is ultimately a pleasing, upbeat alternative to the slew of books that proclaim the demise of love in our cynical time.
Customer Reviews
Affirming insight on love
I have always felt out of place with the way I choose to love, too naive, too vulnerable, too much. Reading Hooks’ All About Love has affirmed my way of loving. And has highlighted ways I could love better for the betterment of humanity. I am grateful to have the opportunity to read such an insightful piece on love.