Will I love All About Love?

I’ve read this book twice and I would read it again and again because it taught me so much about myself in relation to how I want to approach and understand love. It affirmed my feelings about love and gave me the language and tools to understand the dynamics of love in platonic relationships, familial relationships, or romantic relationships.

I enjoyed how Hooks discussed themes such as spirituality, values, trauma, and greed. I consider this book to be an essential read and one I will always go back to when exploring concepts of love.

I chose this book because my sea of recent titles and modern thought would not exist without bell hooks declaration on love. I read this book when I was about 19 and a survivor of sexual violence. That narrative built my work as a feminist artist and author, but my voice was reactionary, punk rock, and full of rage.

Vital to my art, I gave that rage life, but Bell Hooks’ All About Love introduced that rage to love. I would not have reached my vision of self-love, reclaiming spirituality, and radical compassion without learning the ropes from this… show more.

I recommend this book because I have found the meaning of love to be elusive. Slipping in and out of my life's timeline. When love stays, it waits for me to generate it alone, by myself, in hopes that I will alchemize it to all of my relationships. Bell Hooks helped me see how to better understand the mystical workings of love, and it's sometimes confusing nature.

Her work helped me appreciate that the endurance of pain is not the presence of love. Allowing love to be an inner source as life-giving, rather than codependently attaching to an outside source,… show more.

I’ve been researching the history of marriage in recent years for a work of nonfiction and read this book as part of the project.

People don’t talk enough about how our patriarchal systems function to separate people from each other, how they establish human relationships based on power and dominance, and how they therefore prohibit a genuine feeling of love from ever emerging and flourishing.

It’s no accident that so many people in the US promote fierce individualism rather than fostering a feeling of community. We are a communal species and thrive when we love one another. I’m grateful that… show more.

I did not know I need to read a book about love. But, reading Belle Hooks, I discovered I did.

She describes how we mistake all sorts of things for love, but mainly how really loving and being loved is all about giving freedom to each other. The book is about personal love, but I think we can learn a lot about society too and what Rosa Luxemburg might have or should have meant when saying freedom is freedom for the other fellow. 

There is a reason why this book is considered a classic in self-help nonfiction.

It does such a great job of making you think deeper about the ways we love and why. I recommend this for those seeking introspective guidance and understanding, especially around the topics of love and empathy.

All about Love is such a gift to humans, as was bell hooks. Reading this book is all at once heartbreaking, inspiring, confronting, soothing, illuminating, and a true call to action. The action being love. In the very first chapter, only four pages in, hook states, “Love and abuse cannot co-exist.” That hit me hard in the heart and made me question my entire understanding of love. While the non-dualist in me says that there isn’t any separation on the absolute level, on the relative and human level this quote rings with such profound truth.

I experienced many kinds of… show more.