All About Love
Ratings101
Average rating3.7
I really can't believe this book. I need like a million copies so that everyone in my life can read it. Hot take: love is a force for good?
It's rare for a book to take such a strong stance against cynicsim without being dishonest or foolish. While I do feel some parts of this are hollow or under-examined, or have simply aged poorly (would hooks quote Marianne Williams today?), the bigger picture here is vital. A lot of my initial resistance to this book has less to do with the text and more to do with the imaginitive limits of the moral universe in which I spend most of my time. hooks pushes us to think beyond the dominating logics of capitalism and patriarchy without denying their power. Her way of framing patriarchy as emotional terrorism is compelling and fresh to me. And while I do not share all of her spiritual commitments I find them well-articulated here and even a little inspiring. A lot of modern readers don't want to swallow some of these truths, especially in what she says about hedonism and self-indulgence (which are distinct from the goods of ecstasy and pleasure and which really do stand in the way of love). hooks' consistent call to utopian thinking feels naive because we are trained to reject the prospect of real change out of hand, and I feel that is a mistake. It is worth taking hooks' alternative vision seriously.
I had a completely different impression of what this book would contain. I'm not sure where that impression came from, but once I started reading, I was rather disappointed.
First and foremost, this book is a product of its time and culture. By today's standards, it feels outdated and shallow - though perhaps that speaks more of our culture's progress.
That said, there are still aspects worth critiquing, even considering that the book is 25 years old. It leans heavily on quotes from other authors, often to the point where it feels like they were collected simply to validate the author's ideas rather than support them meaningfully. There's a noticeable lack of arguments backed by anything resembling evidence, though, to be fair, the book never explicitly claims to be objective—despite frequently using rhetoric that suggests otherwise.
The most annoying part, though, is the pompous writing style, presenting the author's views as absolute truths. She frequently refers to “many people nowadays,” yet as a reader, I have no sense of whether this reflects a broader trend or just something a friend mentioned over dinner. It is difficult to take the arguments and ideas seriously as the source is unreliable, often contradicting herself throughout the book.
There are still some valid ideas here, but they could have easily been condensed into a magazine article rather than extending them to a book that repeats itself, droning ever on.
I don't agree with everything Bell Hooks has to say here, but when I agree, her words are either enlightening or cathartic to hear.
I found the beginning chapters very insightful and impactful but not so much the later ones. Still one that I will definitely read again.
oooh that was a journey my friends
honest, raw, eye-opener... my jaw was, at multiple times, on the FLOOR by the easiness Bell is able to put words on complex behavior (yet, she explained it so simply that I was like, duh, of course it's the easiest thing to put into words...)
why is it not 5 stars ? as a non-religious person it feels pretty close to a religious book at times
I find myself forced to read about the bible and its content
Okay so, I really liked the first 3 chapters but then it felt like reading a self-help book rather than essays on love. I agree with many things mentioned and raised in this book but I personally didn't feel like there was a lot for me to take away from it and I also didn't always like the way it is written.
So all in all an interesting read and might be a good book for a discussion but maybe not that enjoyable, depending on your taste and expectations.
2.5 stars
I reeeeeally wanted to enjoy this but in the end I had to stop lying to myself and admit that I just didn't. While the book does offer some valuable, intelligent insights, which have stuck with me and reframed some of the ways I think about love, I feel like everything it had to offer was condensed into the first two chapters and the rest just irritated me.
There were many sweeping, absolute statements which lacked concrete examples and follow through explanation. It felt like big, fancy, academic words were just thrown in there to contribute to the scientific illusion, without citing a single study. With the heavy religious undertones too, it kind of just felt like I was being preached at throughout much of the second half. Not my vibe.
In short, Hooks does have some real practical, powerful, and interesting things to say here, but they just could have been articulated in a way that was based on research more so than religion and opinion.
Inspiring and instructive. It opened my eyes to how capitalism and patriarchal issues have molded and still molds today's society and it helped me see a way out of all these madness, and the answer is love. Not love as an abstract noun but an action based on respect, acceptance and other more concrete nouns. I would have given 5 stars if it wasn't for the last chapter, it seemed it was there just to fill up some pages.
This book reads way too much like a self-help number for my liking (there's a lot of references to self-help books in the book too) and though hooks went through some measure of effort to avoid preaching for her own form of faith the amount of references to Christianity and even angels didn't sit quite right with me (it's the ostentation of it that bothers me not so much the religiosity).
There is quite a few references to Erich Fromm (his name is mentioned 12 times in the book) and his influence seems to drip from the page in a way that I would have expected from a college student but not so much from someone with such an eminent reputation as hooks.
There's also a few things that really didn't age well such the aggressive slut shaming of Monica Lewinsky and the victim blaming of Nicole Brown (though that one seemed rather unintentional), sweeping generalizations about men and women with a lack of recognition of how these behaviors are influenced and enforced by our economic system and so on.
While there were a few points which I found interesting it was overall a disappointment.
I really enjoyed the hooks' perspective on love and her exploration of the concept of loving. My only faults with the book are that it was a bit to religious for my taste and it was also heteronormative.
Despite not being the end-all-be-all I, truthfully, expected it to be, I still highly regard this text as profound and deeply essential: one that should be conversed with in order to understand your relationship with love more, and reach your own conclusions about love in life.
This book was beautiful. I really resonated with a lot of it and took a lot of lessons from it. My reason for 4 stars instead of 5 is my aversion to relating love to God and religion and spirituality in general. It is not a criticism of the author, nor of her beliefs, it's simply something I don't relate to so it made parts of the book a bit hard to digest.
What a wonderful first book of the year. So much love clearly went into writing this book about love, which encompasses not only romantic love but all relationships and a “love ethic” with which we treat ourselves and strangers. There are some dated moments (including a weird condemnation of Monica Lewinsky?) but overall this is a timeless book. One that I feel might be worth a yearly revisit.
Hard to say. A couple of the chapters completely blew me away and lead to some really great insights about myself. Others I found very trite and boring. Still glad I read it.
I don't know much about bell hooks, I just happened to pull this book off the shelf because I recognized her name as a controversial author. I had no real intention of doing anything other than thumbing through the book to see what it was about. I couldn't put it down.
hooks' writing flows wonderfully. Her honesty and vulnerability is apparent on just about every page. Her own insights on love combined with the quotations from the broad collection of voices she pulls together are beautifully orchestrated. I especially appreciated her discussion of the importance of family and community. I also enjoyed her thoughts on her spirituality and how it's evolved over her lifetime.
I don't think this is necessarily a groundbreaking book, but I certainly feel uplifted after having read it. So, maybe hooks is controversial elsewhere but, by and large, this book exemplifies the ethos of the “Love Song to the Nation” series that it's part of.
- I guess this is what therapy would feel like *
It took me almost two months to finish this 240 page book. Why? Because it was bloody intense!
all about love as the name suggests talks about all of our ideas, preconceptions, practises and biases around love. It doesn't focus only on romantic love or do a weird sexist gimmicky thing on ‘men are from mars and women are from venus' BS.
Bell Hooks talks us through her ideas, while also quotes various other philosophers and thinkers, discussing various dimensions and ideas around both the concept and practise of love. Her writing is deeply personal and empathetic, making the book feel like a great storyteller and a listener. It's weird because I never felt that way with a “self bettering” book before. I never felt like it was listening to my thoughts and reactions to the words printed on the paper.
Bell Hooks, being a feminist thinker, also brings forward our societies naturalisation of various misogynistic behaviour associated with the act of loving and nurturing. While also suggesting how to alter certain toxic behaviours and ideas to live (and love) your best self.
This book also gave one of the most accurate and precise definition of love that I have learned to adapt and add to my personal dictionary. It goes, “Affection is only one ingredient of love. To truly love we must learn to mix various ingredients—care, affection, recognition, respect, commitment, and trust, as well as honest and open communication.”
Personally, this book did feel a little too idealistic in some parts. Certain aspects felt unrealistic to implement or experience in the long term. Nonetheless the ideas and learnings from this are something I see myself revisiting.
My highlights and notes with this one are dense, hoping to convert it as a blog post soon.
Mixed feelings. Hooks offers fresh language and a perspective different from the usual Buddhist-y fare. Insights that made me pause and reflect. OTOH her spiritual background is christianity, and she harps way too much on it. She also comes off as preachy, holier-than-thou, and I don't want to make a connection there but it sure is hard not to. I got more a sense of grudging tolerance for others than compassion. She also dismissively propagates misinformation about complex historical incidents that deserve more care than she gives them.
Three stars, adding one because the good parts were really, really thought-provoking.
Aside from a few fascinating insights into feminism and the patriarchy, this really wasn't my cup of tea and it was a struggle to finish it.
The fact that it took me almost two full months whilst semi-employed says a lot about my feelings on this book. I have not read anything else by bell hooks at this point and I'll try earlier works based on comments made by other reviewers. However, were her reputation based on this book, I would be surprised.
The book consists of well-intended essays about how love (or the lack of love) affects various areas of our lives. I say well-intended because her style feels like an academic paper that doesn't really connect with her topic; at least 80% is esoteric. Mind you, some gems can be found if you have the patience to spelling for them.
I am certain bell hooks feels very passionate about the subject and provides some personal vignettes to make her pint, yet I just felt at arms length, as opposed to drawn in.