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A review by rosalovo
All About Love: New Visions by bell hooks
3.0
I can’t deny the impact that this book has had, especially when providing people with new language to discuss their personal traumas in love and childhood. Some parts of the book (the chapters on Community, Romance, Loss, and Healing) really resonated with me. There were other parts that felt obvious today, but I know were revolutionary when the book was first published (love and abuse can’t coexist…don’t beat your kids…). Then, there were some parts that left me speechlessness from how much I found myself at odds with the author.
First, I’m an atheist. I’ve NEVER seen religion mentioned in the marketing of this book. Seeing how often Christian theology and musings appear here caught me off guard.
Secondly, to be a queer writer, I disliked how this book focuses mainly on heterosexual romantic relationships. I know she has since written other books about Love and Community which I hope to read, but I definitely felt their absence here.
Third, the anecdote where hooks threatened to tell her bf about his sister’s abuse to strengthen their relationship made me sick! Self explanatory. Honesty is the best policy, but respect other people’s boundaries!
Fourth, hooks constantly contradicts herself chapter to chapter. She sets up the idea that love is a choice, a verb rather than a noun, but then makes a list of several acts of care that don’t count as acts of love. I understand the point she makes about not guilting your children with love (the whole “ofc I love you, I pay for everything you do” gag). However, I think it’s shallow not to touch on how acts of service in love are still that can choice made for the purposeful benefit of the other person. Think Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.
For example, communities living in poverty will share resources for the better of the whole. They don’t HAVE to, they could each hoard their resources. But every church in my rural small town, held community food drives to give to the needy regardless of the recipient’s faith or lack thereof. To me that is an act of community love, but to hooks that wouldn’t count bc it’s providing a basic human need rather than fulfilling an emotional one.
Fifth, everything she wrote about the economy, materialism, and the workplace, failed to hit its mark as a socialist reader. hooks wrote about how materialism is destroying the culture and creating a self centered generation, but she never gets into how this is a larger response to political and economic instability. When she brings up politics, it’s to shame Bill Clinton for his affair although a more poignant reflection on materialism could have been to discuss the oil wars in the Middle East to satisfy US business. A lot of her complaints about how hopeless millennials seemed have to do with the broken promise they were fed about the future that they ultimately lost to late stage capitalism. hooks never acknowledges this.
Ultimately, I think I went into this books with too high of expectations. Everyone talks about it as the book that changed their world view, saved their life, etc., but I’ve never been fond of self help books. If I had read this before CBT or when I was a teenager, I’m sure I would have loved it. As a twenty something post liberal arts degree, I find it largely lackluster. I look forward to reading hooks later works.
First, I’m an atheist. I’ve NEVER seen religion mentioned in the marketing of this book. Seeing how often Christian theology and musings appear here caught me off guard.
Secondly, to be a queer writer, I disliked how this book focuses mainly on heterosexual romantic relationships. I know she has since written other books about Love and Community which I hope to read, but I definitely felt their absence here.
Third, the anecdote where hooks threatened to tell her bf about his sister’s abuse to strengthen their relationship made me sick! Self explanatory. Honesty is the best policy, but respect other people’s boundaries!
Fourth, hooks constantly contradicts herself chapter to chapter. She sets up the idea that love is a choice, a verb rather than a noun, but then makes a list of several acts of care that don’t count as acts of love. I understand the point she makes about not guilting your children with love (the whole “ofc I love you, I pay for everything you do” gag). However, I think it’s shallow not to touch on how acts of service in love are still that can choice made for the purposeful benefit of the other person. Think Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.
For example, communities living in poverty will share resources for the better of the whole. They don’t HAVE to, they could each hoard their resources. But every church in my rural small town, held community food drives to give to the needy regardless of the recipient’s faith or lack thereof. To me that is an act of community love, but to hooks that wouldn’t count bc it’s providing a basic human need rather than fulfilling an emotional one.
Fifth, everything she wrote about the economy, materialism, and the workplace, failed to hit its mark as a socialist reader. hooks wrote about how materialism is destroying the culture and creating a self centered generation, but she never gets into how this is a larger response to political and economic instability. When she brings up politics, it’s to shame Bill Clinton for his affair although a more poignant reflection on materialism could have been to discuss the oil wars in the Middle East to satisfy US business. A lot of her complaints about how hopeless millennials seemed have to do with the broken promise they were fed about the future that they ultimately lost to late stage capitalism. hooks never acknowledges this.
Ultimately, I think I went into this books with too high of expectations. Everyone talks about it as the book that changed their world view, saved their life, etc., but I’ve never been fond of self help books. If I had read this before CBT or when I was a teenager, I’m sure I would have loved it. As a twenty something post liberal arts degree, I find it largely lackluster. I look forward to reading hooks later works.