bell hooks - All About Love

It is a warm affirmation that love is possible and an attack on the culture of narcissism and selfishness.

New York Times Book Review

A gracefully written volume... her treatise offers a deeply personal andin this age of chicken-soupy psychobabbleunabashedly honest view of relationships.

Entertainment Weekly

Her vision seems idealistic... ambitious. Yet it touches a yearning we all have and is expressed so sincerely.... hookss New Visions reminds us that we can be a part of a loving community.

Philadelphia Inquirer

Pay attention to bell hooks. The American writer and cultural critic is becoming a household word... hookss writing typically inspires, enlightens and provokes. She is an academic wild card, the brilliant feminist whose sharp mind can slice the latest scholarly shibboleth.

Boston Globe and Mail

She provides a refreshing spiritual treatise that steps outside the confines of the intellect and into the wilds of the heart.

Seattle Weekly

Every page offers useful nuggets of wisdom to aid the reader in overcoming the fears of total intimacy and of loss.... hookss view of amour is ultimately a pleasing, upbeat alternative to the slew of books that proclaim the demise of love in our cynical time.

Publishers Weekly

A spiritual handbook, weighty with platitudes, yet refreshed with some thoughtful analyses that offer seekers a way to explore loves meaning, or meaningless.

Kirkus Reviews

All About Love: New Visions promises to be one of the most engaging, life-affirming reads of the year. Come to it with an open mind, and an open heart, and prepare to be transformed.

Black Issues Book Review

Like love, this book is worth the commitment.

Toronto Sun

Remembered Rapture: The Writer at Work

A Womans Mourning Song

Wounds of Passion: A Writing Life

Reel to Real: Race, Sex, and Class at the Movies

Bone Black: Memories of Girlhood

Killing Rage: Ending Racism

Art on My Mind: Visual Politics

Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom

Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representations

Sisters of the Yam: Black Women and Self-Recovery

Black Looks: Race and Representation

Breaking Bread: Insurgent Black Intellectual Life (with Cornel West)

Yearning: Race, Gender and Cultural Politics

Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black

Feminist Theory from Margin to Center

Aint I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism

the first love letter i ever wrote was sent to you. just as this book was written to talk to you. anthonyyou have been my most intimate listener. i will love you always.

in the song of solomon there is this passage that reads: i found him whom my soul loves. i held him and would not let him go. to holding on, to knowing again that moment of rapture, of recognition where we can face one another as we really are, stripped of artifice and pretense, naked and not ashamed.

Introduction
Grace: Touched by Love

One
Clarity: Give Love Words

Two
Justice: Childhood Love Lessons

Three
Honesty: Be True to Love

Four
Commitment: Let Love Be Love in Me

Five
Spirituality: Divine Love

Six
Values: Living by a Love Ethnic

Seven
Greed: Simply Love

Eight
Community: Loving Communion

Nine
Mutuality: The Heart of Love

Ten
Romance: Sweet Love

Eleven
Loss: Loving into Life and Death

Twelve
Healing: Redemptive Love

Thirteen
Destiny: When Angels Speak of Love

W HEN I WAS a child, it was clear to me that life was not worth living if we did not know love. I wish I could testify that I came to this awareness because of the love I felt in my life. But it was loves absence that let me know how much love mattered. I was my fathers first daughter. At the moment of my birth, I was looked upon with loving kindness, cherished and made to feel wanted on this earth and in my home. To this day I cannot remember when that feeling of being loved left me. I just know that one day I was no longer precious. Those who had initially loved me well turned away. The absence of their recognition and regard pierced my heart and left me with a feeling of brokenheartedness so profound I was spellbound.

Grief and sadness overwhelmed me. I did not know what I had done wrong. And nothing I tried made it right. No other connection healed the hurt of that first abandonment, that first banishment from loves paradise. For years I lived my life suspended, trapped by the past, unable to move into the future. Like every wounded child I just wanted to turn back time and be in that paradise again, in that moment of remembered rapture where I felt loved, where I felt a sense of belonging.

We can never go back. I know that now. We can go forward. We can find the love our hearts long for, but not until we let go grief about the love we lost long ago, when we were little and had no voice to speak the hearts longing. All the years of my life I thought I was searching for love I found, retrospectively, to be years where I was simply trying to recover what had been lost, to return to the first home, to get back the rapture of first love. I was not really ready to love or be loved in the present. I was still mourningclinging to the broken heart of girlhood, to broken connections. When that mourning ceased I was able to love again.

I awakened from my trance state and was stunned to find the world I was living in, the world of the present, was no longer a world open to love. And I noticed that all around me I heard testimony that lovelessness had become the order of the day. I feel our nations turning away from love as intensely as I felt loves abandonment in my girlhood. Turning away we risk moving into a wilderness of spirit so intense we may never find our way home again. I write of love to bear witness both to the danger in this movement, and to call for a return to love. Redeemed and restored, love returns us to the promise of everlasting life. When we love we can let our hearts speak.

It is possible to speak with our heart directly. Most ancient cultures know this. We can actually converse with our heart as if it were a good friend. In modern life we have become so busy with our daily affairs and thoughts that we have lost this essential art of taking time to converse with our heart.

J ACK K ORNFIELD

O N MY KITCHEN wall hang four snapshots of graffiti art I first saw on construction walls as I walked to my teaching job at Yale University years ago. The declaration, The search for love continues even in the face of great odds, was painted in bright colors. At the time, recently separated from a partner of almost fifteen years, I was often overwhelmed by grief so profound it seemed as though an immense sea of pain was washing my heart and soul away. Overcome by sensations of being pulled underwater, drowning, I was constantly searching for anchors to keep me afloat, to pull me back safely to the shore. The declaration on the construction walls with its childlike drawing of unidentifiable animals always lifted my spirits. Whenever I passed this site, the affirmation of loves possibility sprawling across the block gave me hope.

Signed with the first name of local artist, these works spoke to my heart. Reading them I felt certain the artist was undergoing a crisis in his life, either already confronting loss or facing the possibility of loss. In my head I engaged in imaginary conversations about the meaning of love with him. I told him how his playful graffiti art anchored me and helped restore my faith in love. I talked about the way this declaration with its promise of a love waiting to be found, a love I could still hope for, lifted me out of the abyss I had fallen into. My grief was a heavy, despairing sadness caused by parting from a companion of many years but, more important, it was a despair rooted in the fear that love did not exist, could not be found. And even if it were lurking somewhere, I might never know it in my lifetime. It had become hard for me to continue to believe in loves promise when everywhere I turned the enchantment of power or the terror of fear overshadowed the will to love.