All About Love: New Visions

by bell hooks Narrated by January LaVoy

Overview

A New York Times bestseller and enduring classic, All About Love is the acclaimed first volume in feminist icon bell hooks' ""Love Song to the Nation"" trilogy. All About Love reveals what causes a polarized society, and how to heal the divisions that cause suffering. Here is the truth about love, and inspiration to help us instill caring, compassion, and strength in our homes, schools, and workplaces.

“The word `love' is most often defined as a noun, yet we would all love better if we used it as a verb,” writes bell hooks as she comes out fighting and on fire in All About Love. Here, at her most provocative and intensely personal, renowned scholar, cultural critic and feminist bell hooks offers a proactive new ethic for a society bereft with lovelessness--not the lack of romance, but the lack of care, compassion, and unity. People are divided, she declares, by society's failure to provide a model for learning to love.

As bell hooks uses her incisive mind to explore the question “What is love?” her answers strike at both the mind and heart. Razing the cultural paradigm that the ideal love is infused with sex and desire, she provides a new path to love that is sacred, redemptive, and healing for individuals and for a nation. The Utne Reader declared bell hooks one of the “100 Visionaries Who Can Change Your Life.” All About Love is a powerful, timely affirmation of just how profoundly her revelations can change hearts and minds for the better.

Editorial Reviews

The Barnes & Noble Review
In her compelling book, All About Love: New Visions, bell hooks offers radical new ways to think about love. Here, hooks, one of our most acute social critics, takes the themes that put her on the map — the relationship between love and sexuality, and the interconnectedness between the public and the private — and challenges the prevailing notion that romantic love is more important than all other bonds.

hooks was inspired to write this book by her own difficult childhood during which she felt love was not nurtured, and by the ending of a longtime relationship. hooks examines the state of love in our society, why love is elusive, and how to open our hearts to love once again. "I feel our nation's turning away from love as intensely as I felt love's abandonment in my girlhood," hooks writes in her preface. "Turning away we risk moving into a wilderness of spirit so intense we might never find our way home again. I write of love to bear witness both to the dangers in this movement, and to call for a return to love."

As she has so brilliantly done in her previous works, hooks poses fascinating questions that go to the core of our being and make us think in radical new ways. By challenging us to think of love as an action, not a feeling, hooks offers a rethinking of self-love (without narcissism) that will bring peace and compassion to our personal lives. How can love be an action, not just a feeling? We say we love our children, but are we kind to them? How does even the tiniest lie damage love? How can we move beyond the superficial andtrivializednotions of love to embrace the true love we yearn for? How does the narcissism of society keep us from true self-love? Why have so many of us "failed" at love and become cynical as a result?

By exploring these questions and so many others in clear, thought-provoking chapters, hooks presents a way to cultivate different kinds of love in our hectic lives. All About Love examines love in childhood, love in community, spiritual love, self-love, and love in a number of cultural contexts. hooks urges readers to look at the love we share with friends as a guide to how other kinds of love can grow. She explains that self-acceptance and positive thinking are critical if we are to embrace love in our own life and our community. She helps us realize that we must value all types of love equally.

Imaginative and original, hooks shows how love heals the wounds we bear as individuals and as a nation. All About Love, written in vivid, provocative, and sensual language, is as much about culture as it is about intimacy. It is bell hooks at her most inspiring. In exploring the ties between love and loss hooks takes on a journey that is sacred and transcendent. Her destination: our own hearts and communities.

Toronto Sun

Like love, this book is worth the commitment.

Seattle Weekly

She provides a refreshing spiritual treatise that steps outside the confines of the intellect and into the wilds of the heart.

Maya Angelou

Each offering from bell hooks is a major event, as she has so much to give us.

Elise Harris

[hooks's] best points are simple ones. Community -- extended family, creative or political collaboration, friendship -- is as important as the couple or the nuclear family; love is an art that involves work, not just the thrill of attraction; desire may depend on illusion, but love comes only through painful truth-telling; work and money have replaced the values of love and community, and this must be reversed.
—The New York Times Book Review

Product Details

BN ID:	2940159331359
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	10/17/2023
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

All About Love
New Visions

Chapter One

The men in my life have always been the folks who are wary of using the word "love" lightly. They are wary because they believe women make too much of love. And they know that what we think love means is not always what they believe it means. Our confusion about what we mean when we use the word "love" is the source of our difficulty in loving. If our society had a commonly held understanding of the meaning of love, the act of loving would not be so mystifying. Dictionary definitions of love tend to emphasize romantic love, defining love first and foremost as "profoundly tender, passionate affection for another person, especially when based on sexual attraction." Of course, other definitions let the reader know one may have such feelings within a context that is not sexual. However, deep affection does not really adequately describe love's meaning.

The vast majority of books on the subject of love work hard to avoid giving clear definitions. In the introduction to Diane Ackerman's A Natural History of Love she declares "Love is the great intangible." A few sentences down from this she suggests: "Everyone admits that love is wonderful and necessary, yet no one can agree on what it is." Coyly, she adds, "We use the word love in such a sloppy way that it can mean almost nothing or absolutely everything." No definition ever appears in her book that would help anyone trying to learn the art of loving. Yet she is not alone in writing of love in ways that cloud our understanding. When the very meaning of the word is cloaked in mystery, it should not come as a surprise that most people find it hard to define what theymean when they use the word "love."

Imagine how much easier it would be for us to learn how to love if we began with a shared definition. The word "love" is most often defined as a noun, yet all the more astute theorists of love acknowledge that we would all love better if we used it as a verb. I spent years searching for a meaningful definition of the word "love," and was deeply relieved when I found one in psychiatrist M. Scott Peck's classic self-help book The Road Less Traveled, first published in 1978. Echoing the work of Erich Fromm, he defines love as "the will to extend one's self for the purpose of nurturing one's own or another's spiritual growth." Explaining further, he continues, "Love is as love does. Love is an act of will-namely, both an intention and an action. Will also implies choice. We do not have to love. We choose to love." Since the choice must be made to nurture growth, this definition counters the more widely accepted assumption that we love instinctually.

Everyone who has witnessed the growth process of a newborn child from the moment of birth on sees clearly that before language is known, before the identity of caretakers is recognized, babies respond to affectionate care. Usually they respond with sounds or looks of pleasure. As they grow older they respond to affectionate care by giving affection, cooing at the sight of a welcomed caretaker. Affection is only one ingredient of love. To truly love we must learn to mix various ingredients-care, affection, recognition, respect, commitment, and trust, as well as honest and open communication. Learning faulty definitions of love when we are quite young makes it difficult to be loving as we grow older. We start out committed to the right path but go in the wrong direction. Most of us learn early on to think of love as a feeling. When we feel deeply drawn to someone, we cathect with them, that is, we invest feelings or emotion in them. That process of investment wherein a loved one becomes important to us is called "cathexis." In his book Peck rightly emphasizes that most of us "confuse cathecting with loving." We all know how often individuals feeling connected to someone through the process of cathecting insist that they love the other person even if they are hurting or neglecting them. Since their feeling is that of cathexis, they insist that what they feel is love.

All About Love
New Visions. Copyright © by bell hooks. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.

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