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I really wanted to like this book, because I like bell hooks, her ideas and what she stands for.But, my god! I found myself having to scan page after page in a half-read because I couldn't bare the self-help dialogue that she was engaging in. Furthermore, I found myself absolutely cringing over the books she referenced, not to mention how many times she quoted The Road Less Traveled.Yes. I felt like some kind of academic snob while reading it, each time I would roll my eyes and skip ahead.Yes. I...
This book is a GEM!!! If I were to highlight pages or write notes, I’d be highlighting and rewriting the entire book. There were so many a-ha moments for me. I picked this book up at a time where I needed it most. I look forward to rereading and reflecting.
The best and worst thing about this book was hooks' commitment throughout the work to making powerful, decisive statements that wanted to leave little room open for argument. When she was on, this authoritative voice felt like a revelation -- such as when she declares that abuse and love cannot coexist. It's a beautiful, affirming, heartbreaking statement, that seems to have a large weight of truth behind it, at once the most and least obvious thing. The definition of love that she borrows and e...
i find it astonishing that so many people i otherwise respect & admire got so into this book. i would love to try an experiment where this book is re-released under some nobody's name, rather than bell hooks, & we can see how people respond to it when they aren't actually responding to the whole bell hooks association. i have LOVED a lot of hooks's books. this was a big pile of crap, & not just that, it ushered in a whole generation of terrible crappy books written by bell hooks. there has been
This is a tough one: bell hooks is a pioneer of the idea of intersectionality, but the book, published in 2000, already feels dated - which might be a good thing, as the topics discussed have become more mainstream. hooks' ethics of love touches upon subjects like gender-specific child-rearing and violence against children, love as action, toxic masculinity and self-care, and I suppose at least the two latter concepts haven't been a thing in the year 2000. So in a way, hooks was at the forefront...
Reading this is like receiving a hug that also makes you smarter.You don't realize until you read this how we treat love like a silly subject as a culture, how we kind of giggle at it and reduce its significance. This reminds you of how we can all benefit from taking love seriously, from studying it like the subject it is.A lot has changed in the 20-plus years since it was written, and the very binary interpretation of gender makes this less applicable than it might be...and I am not a Christian...
What did I just read?hooks is an incredible person and an incredible writer, but I think the hooks I used to know, and the hooks I want to know now are two very different people. That's okay, because I am in support of people growing and changing and becoming, whatever, their most authentic selves. But I was surprised by this book.I would say the first half or more really did work for me. hooks writes here about LOVE, the power of LOVE, the way LOVE is viewed in our western culture, the problems...
I really love bell hooks, but this may be closer to a 2.5 - disliked the religious undertones, the (at times) generalising statements, and lack of rigour (rigour that I was expecting in an ‘exposition’ of the concept of love). It started off well, with some clear and illuminating statements, but I found it inconsistent. The final third of the book seemed to resonate. I found myself experiencing polarised emotions - underlining whole sections, and then laughing at others. I didn’t find hooks’s ex...
"We do not need to have endless anxiety and worry about whether we will fulfill our goals or plans. Death is always there to remind us that our plans are transitory."
I could write almost every page of this book a five-star review. bell hooks, African-American feminist author of the revelationary The Will to Change , creates another visionary work with All About Love. She argues for the importance of love in our private and public lives in powerful and innovative ways. At first the title of this book made me roll my eyes a little, in a "oh yay, a book that's all about love, how cliche" kinda way. But from the very first page, hooks offers piercing insights...
While there were a couple of bits of this book I liked (hence the two stars), on the whole, this is a thumbs down for me.Firstly, it was incredibly heterocentric. While the book at times acknowledged gay people existed, that didn't change the tone throughout. The only two gay people mentioned were a graffiti artist who did a work the author admired that was apparently commentary on the (then current) AIDS crisis, and a lesbian who on the author's advice maintained contact with her toxic, homopho...
I agree with most of bell hooks’ thoughts in this book and the notion that love can be a transformative power that heals individuals, communities, and even public policies and institutions if we prioritized it over greed. Would that ever happen though? As a cynic, I seriously doubt it. Still, it was nice to imagine this idealistic world. She lost me later with the overemphasis on spirituality, at one point literally referencing angels, so I think a religious person might resonate with this book
My book club chose this book in honor of Valentine's Day. It's the first (and probably now only) book I've ever read by Bell Hooks, and I was excited to read it. When I checked it out of the library along with a huge stack of other books, the librarian pulled it out and said, "Oh, this book is SO good." Which made me even more excited to read it.If she had stopped after the first two chapters, I probably would have recommended it as a worthwhile essay to read. I liked that she really took the ti...
I’m not smart enough for all this brilliance but just like with love there is time to unpack and understand. This book is so important. A few sections were hard to follow. Also a lot of importance was laid on religion/the spiritual which didn’t click for me.
Well, so, OK. Here's the thing. This book changed/is changing my life. It came to me at just the right second (by which I mean, I took it from the house where I was house-sitting at just the right second), and I have taken it straight to heart. hooks is in the business of life-changing, really, whether she's teaching us how to love in the face of a planet of lovelessness, or teaching us to find, confront, and exorcise the racism and sexism by which we invariably live. What got to me in "All Abou...
bell hooks, born Gloria Jean Waltins, in 1952, an American author, professor, feminist, and social activist, recently died — [December 15, 2021]— I had never read her work until this book “All About Love”. The name bell hooks is borrowed from her maternal great-grandmother. bell published more than thirty books….Her focus was on race, capitalism, oppression, class, gender, art, history, sexuality, mass media, and feminism. There have been thousands of books written about love— Both fiction and n...
Some friends recommended this book to me because I was going through something traumatic, and I think they were really right. bell hooks talks about love in a way that's so healing. Love is universal, tangible, and transformative. And it comes in so many forms. Also, love isn't about an absence of pain or grief, but something that lives alongside it and makes being alive more bearable. Love is also remarkably different from abuse and the two can't exist at the same time. Love is about communion,...
I started off really liking this book and then it i just kind of lost interest. I think the book is very well written which I always find appealing. I also think it's interesting to think of love as a verb and in the framework laid out by Hooks. I just like others started to get put off by the sermonizing. It can be cool to read where others are coming from but I guess what I found off putting was for me love is about extending others understanding and the benefit of the doubt but her comments a...
I have to say I had mixed feelings about this book. I found it eye-opening at times, but other times I simply couldn't connect with it at all, and couldn't quite move past some gender generalisations that the author so passionately claims herself to stand against. It did make me think about the meaning of love and the context of love more widely, yet I still can't agree with some of the principles on which this book is based and the idea that unless love follows certain rules (e.g. "there is no
Yes. Please do read this. Make yourself better make the world better. You can trust bell hooks.eta :: just couldn't not add this. Those giving the one=and two stars, those folks need love too. Be kind.