The Barnes & Noble Review
In her compelling book, All About Love: New Visions, bell hooks offers radical new ways to think about love. Here, hooks, one of our most acute social critics, takes the themes that put her on the map — the relationship between love and sexuality, and the interconnectedness between the public and the private — and challenges the prevailing notion that romantic love is more important than all other bonds.

hooks was inspired to write this book by her own difficult childhood during which she felt love was not nurtured, and by the ending of a longtime relationship. hooks examines the state of love in our society, why love is elusive, and how to open our hearts to love once again. "I feel our nation's turning away from love as intensely as I felt love's abandonment in my girlhood," hooks writes in her preface. "Turning away we risk moving into a wilderness of spirit so intense we might never find our way home again. I write of love to bear witness both to the dangers in this movement, and to call for a return to love."

As she has so brilliantly done in her previous works, hooks poses fascinating questions that go to the core of our being and make us think in radical new ways. By challenging us to think of love as an action, not a feeling, hooks offers a rethinking of self-love (without narcissism) that will bring peace and compassion to our personal lives. How can love be an action, not just a feeling? We say we love our children, but are we kind to them? How does even the tiniest lie damage love? How can we move beyond the superficial andtrivializednotions of love to embrace the true love we yearn for? How does the narcissism of society keep us from true self-love? Why have so many of us "failed" at love and become cynical as a result?

By exploring these questions and so many others in clear, thought-provoking chapters, hooks presents a way to cultivate different kinds of love in our hectic lives. All About Love examines love in childhood, love in community, spiritual love, self-love, and love in a number of cultural contexts. hooks urges readers to look at the love we share with friends as a guide to how other kinds of love can grow. She explains that self-acceptance and positive thinking are critical if we are to embrace love in our own life and our community. She helps us realize that we must value all types of love equally.

Imaginative and original, hooks shows how love heals the wounds we bear as individuals and as a nation. All About Love, written in vivid, provocative, and sensual language, is as much about culture as it is about intimacy. It is bell hooks at her most inspiring. In exploring the ties between love and loss hooks takes on a journey that is sacred and transcendent. Her destination: our own hearts and communities.

Like love, this book is worth the commitment.

She provides a refreshing spiritual treatise that steps outside the confines of the intellect and into the wilds of the heart.

Each offering from bell hooks is a major event, as she has so much to give us.

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. (Jan.) Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

English professor hooks (Remembered Rapture) has myriad views on the subject of love in this serious work; she touches on honesty in relationships, spirituality in our lives, greed as a destructive force, and the death of loved ones. Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

[hooks's] best points are simple ones. Community -- extended family, creative or political collaboration, friendship -- is as important as the couple or the nuclear family; love is an art that involves work, not just the thrill of attraction; desire may depend on illusion, but love comes only through painful truth-telling; work and money have replaced the values of love and community, and this must be reversed.
—The New York Times Book Review