book review:
all about love by bell hooks Words by Reading Feminism Reading Feminism’s March book was bell hooks’ All About Love. This work, published in 1999, is an exploration of ‘love’ and an attempt to write a history and a theory of love that can radically intervene in what hooks describes as a world structured by a lack of love. For hooks, once ‘we’, as a culture and community, recognise that love and abuse cannot coexist and that self-love is a non-narcissistic and centrally important practice, we can then learn to structure our lives and relationships according to the ethics of love and forgiveness.
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Throughout this work, hooks makes strong and definitive claims on love and its interconnectedness with the personal and the political. hooks powerfully writes that “to open our hearts more fully to love’s power and grace we must dare to acknowledge how little we know of love in both theory and practice”. This idea is a transformative one, after all, “schools for love do not exist”. Many of us read All About Love in isolation, something that made us yearn for some collective and spiritual healing, and in this specific context hooks’s meditative theorisation on love is meditative and empowering.
