All About Love: New Visions: 1 (Love Song to the Nation, 1) - Softcover

Hooks, Bell

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0060959479 ISBN 13: 9780060959470

Publisher: William Morrow Paperbacks, 2016

Synopsis

The acclaimed first volume in bell hooks' "Love Song to the Nation"

“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, bell hooks (renowned scholar, cultural critic, and feminist) skewers our view of love as romance. In its place she offers a proactive new ethic for a people and a society bereft with lovelessness.

As bell hooks uses her incisive mind and razor-sharp pen to explore the question “What is love?” her answers strike at both the mind and heart. In thirteen concise chapters, hooks examines her own search for emotional connection and society’s failure to provide a model for learning to love. 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 affirmation of just how profoundly she can.

About this title

Review:

Reading bell hooks is a little like talking to an eccentric, favourite aunt: you gleefully picture her ploughing into conversational niceties and laying waste to social gatherings with her almost obsessive contempt for tact. But although you become more acquainted here with the writer's character than you would normally expect to in a book about love, hooks' heartfelt words pare down to a beautiful simplicity that unlocks tensions as you read and calms you like a long, deep breath of the soul. She expounds that we as individuals and as a society must return to truth in order to know real love. Early wounds have bound us in fear of letting ourselves truly love despite our deep yearnings for it and we seek to supplant this desire with nmaterial greed. "Because we are spiritually empty we try to fill up on consumerism; we may not have enough love but we can always shop." But if we are willing to turn back to our own hearts we can open ourselves up to "the transformative power of love". And there is no doubt that following hooks' counsel and "choosing to feel love" with friends, family and even strangers is one that can lift you onto a little cloud of happiness and make you wonder why you hadn't thought of it before.--Rebecca Johnson

Review:

"Each offering from bell hooks is a major event, as she has so much to give us."-- Maya Angelou"She provides a refreshing spiritual treatise that steps outside the confines of the intellect and into the wilds of the heart."-- "Seattle Weekly"Like love, this book is worth the commitment."-- "Toronto Sun

About this edition

• Publisher: William Morrow Paperbacks
• Publication date: 2016
• ISBN 10: 0060959479
• ISBN 13: 9780060959470
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 272