Looking for Love--in Our Personal and Communal Lives

All About Love: New Visions

By bell hooks

William Morrow

237 pages, $22

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As bell hooks points out early in her book of essays on love, intellectuals and cultural critics are usually the last people one would expect to write about love. Yet hooks, a professor of English at City College of New York and author of 16 books on race, politics, feminism and creativity, has done just that in a book that may appear to be a radical departure from some of her other writings but is also her most personal and accessible work to date.

One of the surprises of “All About Love” is the knowledge that hooks, like many women inside and outside academic circles, is a voracious reader of books on love and self-esteem. Her sources and inspiration range from the usual self-help suspects Marianne Williamson, Deepak Chopra and psychotherapist John Wellwood to less likely but equally compelling voices (novelist James Baldwin, poet Rainer Maria Rilke or, perversely, rapper Lil’ Kim). And hooks uses the material as an elegant plea for a dialogue on creating more loving environments in our homes and communities.

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Arguing that our difficulty in loving stems from confusion in our use of the term, hooks offers M. Scott Peck’s definition from his seminal 1978 work “The Road Less Traveled,” namely that love is “the will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth.”

Reflecting on her own flawed family and romantic experiences, hooks elaborates Peck’s definition: “To truly love, we must learn to mix various ingredients--care, affection, recognition, respect, commitment and trust, as well as honest and open communication.”

In the dozen essays that follow, the author examines these elements and their interplay in loving relationships. Among the most powerful is one that explores the decline of spirituality as a harbinger of love and the rise of some organized religions that pay “so much attention to individual self-improvement and so little to the practice of love within the context of community.” Here the text achieves a fluid interplay between the personal and philosophical that is perfectly balanced and accessible to all readers and spiritual seekers.

By the time hooks addresses mutuality of feeling and romance in the final third of the book, this seemingly familiar aspect of love is enhanced by a better understanding of the forces that work to open our hearts to love.

The book, however, is not without its flaws and may find a less enthusiastic audience among advanced readers of spiritual or self-help topics, for whom many of the insights and sources may seem needlessly repetitive.

Despite these few flaws, “All About Love” remains a valuable synthesis of current thinking on love in our society, interpreted by an intelligent and compassionate seeker not unlike the readers for whom she writes. One hopes, especially as we approach next month’s traditional day of love, that her efforts receive a wide and enthusiastic hearing.