Hooks, Bell "All About Love: New Visions"

Hooks, Bell "All About Love: New Visions" - 1999

I read this because it was suggested in the Goodreads group created by Emma Watson "Our Shared Shelf".

I thought this might be a good and interesting non-fiction book but found that it sounded more like those self-help ones that promise that everything will be fine as long as you love yourself and love the world and all such stuff. Yeah, I'm not really a yoga-meditation kind of person and I don't believe that you can change everything in the world once you start looking at it different. How will we get rid of terrorists? Love yourself? How will we prevent World War III? Love yourself? You see the drift and you see the problem I have with that sort of stuff. I have lived in a very hateful environment for a long long time and I cannot change people's minds, I have to live with it. It doesn't make it better if people start telling me that I just have to change my mind and everything will be find. Would they have told that to a Jew who was carted off to a concentration camp? And how many of them would have believed them?

All in all, I think this book is more depressive than uplifting. One of the books where I wish I could speed-read and just get through a hundred pages in a minute, that sort of thing.  I will stop now because otherwise I will just be rambling on like the author did.

From the back cover: "A visionary and accessible book, bell hooks's All About Love 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.
All About Love is a blueprint for finding myriad types of love, which hold the redemptive power to change our minds and lives. In thirteen concise chapters, hooks explains how our everyday notions of what it means to give and receive love often fail us, and how these ideals are established in early childhood. But 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 and professional lives.
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. In exploring the ties between love and loss, hooks takes us on a journey that is sacred and transcendent. Her destination: our own hearts and communities."