All About Love

English language

Published Feb. 18, 2018

ISBN:
978-0-06-095947-0
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3 stars (2 reviews)

All About Love: New Visions is a book by bell hooks published in 2000 that discusses aspects of love in modern society. Hooks combines personal anecdotes as well as psychological and philosophical ideas to develop and strengthen her argument. She focuses on romantic love and believes that in American culture men have been socialized to mistrust the value and power of love while women have been socialized to be loving in most situations – even when their need to receive love goes unmet. Each chapter discusses an aspect of love. First she explains her position and introduces an external work which is primarily about that aspect of love. Then she provides suggestions on how to reverse our cultural training and become more open to giving and receiving love. These aspects are affection, respect, recognition, commitment, trust, care, and open and honest communication - rather than the customary forms stemming from …

4 editions

All about love but hard to like

2 stars

This is a book about love, which begins by promising a different perspective than the common romantic-love angle in similar books. I hoped I would love it, but perhaps it was just the wrong introduction for me to bell hooks' writing. There are moments of brilliance, such as the excellent sixth chapter: Values, which discusses richly and poetically in how social systems influence thoughts on love.

However, most of the writing failed to land. It felt like an attempt to marry academic writing with memoir, with too little rigour for the former and too little reflection for the latter. Narrow personal reflections are given as evidence for problems with love painted with broad brushstrokes, and throughout the book the perspective is very US-centric, never considering love from any non-US or non-western perspective. Repetition also mars most chapters. In the end, the book is a bit too loose and while hooks' …

excellent positive tone and cultural critique

4 stars

Love is a willful act, to honestly commit and extend yourself to make others' conditions of growth your own. The ways our society portrays love as compatible with domination, selfishness, accumulation, and instant gratification make it harder to recognize and enact meaningful love, but we all have access to loving counter-narratives in community, friendships, religion, self-acceptance, etc.

My first hooks, a deeply well-read commentator pulling in a wide range of threads from 20c writing and her personal experiences.