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A review by moonyreadsbystarlight
All About Love: New Visions by bell hooks
hopeful
informative
inspiring
reflective
3.0
I was really ready to love this book, especially after a great experience with Teaching to Transgress earlier this month. While there is definitely some great insight in parts of this, there were a lot of areas that were lacking. There was a lot that she said about love that I thought was very spot-on. The first few chapters were very strong, while she was first defining love and then talking about childhood and love being incompatable with abuse. Additionally, her point about going through the world with a love ethic was a great perspective. There are even some wonderful quotes about the materialistic society being incompatible with love and the way that patriarchy impacts how we are taught to love.
However, when she went into detail talking about society, the insight from those quotes did not come through in that greater analysis. She talks about how capitalism has made the culture focused on material goods and not people, but she doesn't really address the issue of poverty in that. She talks about people specifically in impoverished situations acting selfishly and talks about the culture; but she doesn't bring nuance into how those people are neglected on multiple fronts nor does she talk about the people who get rich from that neglect. She even mentions prisons and says that so many people are in prison because of selfish choices to get money to buy extravagant things; but she doesn't mention how many people did these things out of need, how many rich people who steal even more money don't see the inside of a prison as often or for as long, or how the very existence of prisons in US today are a direct result of government and corporate greed and power. In this same section, she really simplified addiction in a way that was really unhelpful. While I do think looking at the ramifications this culture can have on individuals is important, it cannot be properly done without also looking at how it impacts them on every level. It was very frustrating for me personally because I could see how easily this idea of a love ethic could fit into this broader analysis of capitalism really well, but she only brought that in small glimpses. This was honestly the biggest issue for me and it made it really hard to engage with the rest of the text that followed.
I also thought there were other points that, while they were often true, really needed nuance. For instance, when talking about forgiveness and letting toxic family members stay in ones life, there was only discussion of why it was necessary to let those people in -- not anything on what it would look like to have boundaries for yourself. There were also a few great ideas that would have been really great to see expanded more (like the idea of healthy interdependency that she mentions in the last chapter).
All that being said, I think it's a worthwhile read for some of the insight from a personal or self-help angle (it definitely exceeds most books that are in that sort of category). A lot of people have benefited from this text and the great insight about love as an action and the complicated relationships that people can have. For me, personally, it just missed the mark with what I was expecting in regards to social commentary.
However, when she went into detail talking about society, the insight from those quotes did not come through in that greater analysis. She talks about how capitalism has made the culture focused on material goods and not people, but she doesn't really address the issue of poverty in that. She talks about people specifically in impoverished situations acting selfishly and talks about the culture; but she doesn't bring nuance into how those people are neglected on multiple fronts nor does she talk about the people who get rich from that neglect. She even mentions prisons and says that so many people are in prison because of selfish choices to get money to buy extravagant things; but she doesn't mention how many people did these things out of need, how many rich people who steal even more money don't see the inside of a prison as often or for as long, or how the very existence of prisons in US today are a direct result of government and corporate greed and power. In this same section, she really simplified addiction in a way that was really unhelpful. While I do think looking at the ramifications this culture can have on individuals is important, it cannot be properly done without also looking at how it impacts them on every level. It was very frustrating for me personally because I could see how easily this idea of a love ethic could fit into this broader analysis of capitalism really well, but she only brought that in small glimpses. This was honestly the biggest issue for me and it made it really hard to engage with the rest of the text that followed.
I also thought there were other points that, while they were often true, really needed nuance. For instance, when talking about forgiveness and letting toxic family members stay in ones life, there was only discussion of why it was necessary to let those people in -- not anything on what it would look like to have boundaries for yourself. There were also a few great ideas that would have been really great to see expanded more (like the idea of healthy interdependency that she mentions in the last chapter).
All that being said, I think it's a worthwhile read for some of the insight from a personal or self-help angle (it definitely exceeds most books that are in that sort of category). A lot of people have benefited from this text and the great insight about love as an action and the complicated relationships that people can have. For me, personally, it just missed the mark with what I was expecting in regards to social commentary.