A review by jayisreading
All About Love: New Visions by bell hooks

reflective slow-paced

2.25

I’m a bit surprised that I ended up not enjoying All About Love as much as I thought I would. I greatly admire bell hooks and the knowledge she has shared with the world (Teaching to Transgress is one that I found quite impactful). I entered All About Love to learn about… well, love. I suppose I did, but I didn’t anticipate it to be as spiritually guided as it ended up being. Not that this is a bad thing, but there was almost a New Age quality to this book that made me roll my eyes a little.

More than that, though, I was shocked that despite the incredible focus on the ways in which issues such as misogyny, sexism, and capitalism stop us from truly loving one another, hooks’ ideas did not apply to everyone. For example, her comment on Monica Lewinsky (called a “young woman”) as “greedy” took me by surprise. What happened to respect, which she emphasized was a necessary part of love? I also took issue with hooks’ insistence that queer people should find ways to stay in touch with toxic family members. This isn’t a possibility for many members of the queer community, especially if they want to put their happiness and well-being at the forefront, which are important because they lead to the finding of a deep sense of love that they weren’t given before.

I want to step away from the criticisms to at least highlight things I appreciated about this book, though. For one, I truly appreciated that hooks challenged the idea of love being exclusive to romance. I was most taken to her points on how we can learn from platonic love and community building to deepen other forms of love. I also liked that she showed love to be a multifaceted thing, that it is comprised of care, respect, responsibility, commitment, among other traits that displays the complexity of loving.

All things considered, writing about love is a huge undertaking, especially to break it down the way hooks did. However, I think this book is of its time (first published in 1999) in its language and understanding of the world. If there’s anything I’ve come to realize while making my way through this book, it’s that love is ever-changing and difficult to explain given everything that’s happening in the world every day. hooks tried, and I think there were some valuable points to take away from this book, but it didn’t make the impact I was hoping it would.
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