Book Review: All About Love by Bell Hooks

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Book Review: All About Love by Bell Hooks

If you’re a

This book helps

I personally feel that this book should be required reading. There, I said it. I have turned many of my closest and dearest friends onto this book. By associating a tentative yet decisive definition of love (from Peck’s “The Road Less Traveled”), bell hooks has brought great comprehension and awareness to the subject of love. There are so many things I want to write about this but I will be writing my personal essay on this book – offline. But to continue, bell hooks explores our cultures’ obsession with power and money (further aggravated by capitalism and presidential corruption), maintaining patriarchal and sexist ideals, as well as continuous mystification and cynicism about love in the media (movies, self-help books, etc.), and our love of death (by lessening the reality of love and of living life; we translate that by our constant fear in the daily life due to the fear of confronting death.) Love has become a taboo subject. Self-love has been twisted into narcissistic endeavours. And lovelessness (in general or as a result of the lack of love we have felt since early childhood) is the only way we communicate and refer to this human, collective yearning. In order to heal and get back to the path to love, we need community. We need to open ourselves up. We need to represent functional families and define love that is not framed through simple care or love that is mingled with abuse and dysfunction. We have accepted the lies surrounding love for too long. Real true love is hard work. It’s honest, it’s open, it’s mutual, it’s communicative, and it involves the nurturing and growth of two souls. Real true love has no place for lies and power.

“Those we love never truly leave us, Harry. There are things that death cannot touch.” 

“In every shining moment of happiness is that drop of poison: the knowledge that pain will come again. Be honest to those you love, show your pain. To suffer is as human as to breathe.” 

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