All About Love: New Visions By Bell Hooks (PDF-Summary-Review-Online Reading-Download-Quotes)

TitleIce Planet Barbarians
AuthorBell Hooks
PublisherHarperOCLC
TypeNonfiction, Self Help, Philosophy
Year of PublicationJuly 2, 2000
LanguageEnglish
File FormatPDF
Number of Pages272
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All About Love: New Visions is a book by bell hooks published in 2000 that analyzes aspects of love in modern society. Hooks combines personal anecdotes as well as psychological and philosophical ideas to develop and strengthen his argument. She focuses on romantic love and believes that in American culture men have been socialized to distrust the value and power of love, while women have been socialized to love in most situations, even when their need to receive love is not satisfied.

Each chapter discusses an aspect of love. First, she explains her position and introduces external work that deals primarily with that aspect of love. She then offers suggestions on how to reverse our cultural background and be more open to giving and receiving love. These aspects are affection, respect, recognition, commitment, trust, care, and open and honest communication, rather than the usual forms derived from gender stereotypes, domination, control, ego, and aggression.

All About Love Summary

All About Love offers radical new ways of thinking about love by showing its interconnectedness in our private and public lives. In eleven concise chapters, the hooks explain how our everyday notions of what it means to give and receive love often fail us, and how these ideals are established in early childhood. She offers a rethink of self-love (without narcissism) that will bring peace and compassion to our personal and professional lives and affirms the place of love to end struggles between individuals, communities, and societies. Moving from the cultural to the intimate, Hooks observes the ties between love and loss and challenges the prevailing notion that romantic love is the most important love of all.

Visionary and original, the hooks show how love heals the wounds that we carry as individuals and as a nation, as it is the cornerstone of compassion and forgiveness and has the power to overcome shame.

For readers who have found delight and wisdom in the life and work of Bell Hooks, and for those who are just discovering it, All About Love is an essential read and a brilliant book that will change the way we think about love, our culture, and each other.

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All About Love Review

The word “love” is most often defined as a noun, still. . . We would all love it more if we used it as a verb ”, writes Bell Hooks when he goes out to fight and burns in All About Love. Here, in her most provocative and intensely personal moment, the renowned scholar, cultural critic, and feminist criticize our vision of love as romance. Instead, she offers a new proactive ethic for a people and a society devoid of love.

As Bell Hooks uses her incisive mind and sharp pen to explore the question “What is love?” her responses strike both the mind and the 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. Trailing the cultural paradigm that ideal love is steeped in sex and desire, it provides a new path to love that is sacred, redeeming, and healing for individuals and for a nation. The Utne Reader stated that Bell Hooks is one of the “100 Visionaries Who Can Change Your Life”. All About Love is a powerful affirmation of how deeply you can do it.

About The Author of The Book Bell Hooks

Bell Hooks (born Gloria Jean Watkins) is an African-American author, feminist, and social activist. Her writing has focused on the interconnectivity of race, class, and gender and their ability to produce and perpetuate systems of oppression and domination. She has published over thirty books and numerous scholarly and mainstream articles appeared in several documentary films and participated in various public lectures. Primarily through a postmodern female perspective, she has addressed race, class, and gender in education, art, history, sexuality, mass media, and feminism.

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All About Love Quotes

Love requires reflection and constant practice. Lucky for us, Black feminist and activist Bell Hooks (born Gloria Jean Watkins) writes about how to do just that in All About Love: New Visions, a must-read for feminists, lovers, social justice professionals, and humanity, period.

When we face pain in relationships our first response is often to save bonds rather than to maintain commitment.

But many of us seek community solely to escape the fear of being alone. Knowing how to be solitary is central to the art of loving. When we can be alone, we can be with others without using them as a means of escape.

The practice of love offers no place of safety. We risk loss, hurt, and pain. We risk being acted upon by forces outside our control.

Individuals who want to believe that there is no fulfillment in love, that true love does not exist, cling to these assumptions because this despair is actually easier to face than the reality that love is a real fact of life but is absent from their lives.

Contrary to what we may have been taught to think, unnecessary and unchosen suffering wounds us but need not scar us for life. It does mark us. What we allow the mark of our suffering to become is in our own hands.

Giving generously in romantic relationships, and in all other bonds, means recognizing when the other person needs our attention. Attention is an important resource.

A generous heart is always open, always ready to receive our going and coming. In the midst of such love, we need never fear abandonment. This is the most precious gift true love offers – the experience of knowing we always belong.

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