As Rebecca Solnit once so elegantly expressed, calling things by their true names “isn’t all there is to changing the world, but it’s a key step.” If our society had a commonly held understanding of the meaning of love, the act of loving would not be so mystifying.” After all, we can only love (and be loved) if we know what love is. Though at first love seems beyond definition, too elusive to be captured in a semantic net of description, hooks attempts to define love because “our confusion about what we mean when we use the word “love” is the source of our difficulty in loving.

In her revelatory All About Love, scholar, feminist and cultural critic bell hooks aims to clarify this indefinite emotion. Vincent Millay, love might not be “all,” but “many a man is making friends with death for lack of love alone.” Perhaps the best definition is no definition at all as poet and naturalist Diane Ackerman writes, “love is the great intangible.” For poetess and prototypical feminist Sylvia Plath, love is a Venn diagram of two independent but intersecting identities. 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.The definitions of love are many. 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. People are divided, she declares, by society’s failure to provide a model for learning to love.Īs bell hooks uses her incisive mind to explore the question “What is love?” her answers strike at both the mind and heart. 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. “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 is the truth about love, and inspiration to help us instill caring, compassion, and strength in our homes, schools, and workplaces. All About Love reveals what causes a polarized society, and how to heal the divisions that cause suffering.

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 bell hook