All About Love

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.