While many of us feel heavy with grief at the loss of hooks and her contributions to arts, letters, and ideas, we are also voraciously reading and rereading both in mourning and celebration of her impact as a critical theorist, a professor, a poet, a lover, and a thinker.Īs a professor of Black feminisms at Cornell University, where I often teach classes featuring bell hooks’s work, I see a syllabus as having the potential to be a love letter, a mixtape for revolution. With her wide array of essays of cultural criticism from the 1980s and 1990s, hooks dared to love Blackness and criticize the patriarchy out loud she was generous and attentive in her analysis of pop culture as a self-proclaimed “bad girl.” Sadly, the announcement of her death this week, at 69, adds to a too-long list of Black thinkers, artists, and public figures gone too soon.

To read bell hooks is to become initiated into the power and inclusiveness of Black feminism whether you are a Black woman or not. Perhaps the two lessons were both sides of the same coin. 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.Photo: The Washington Post/The Washington Post via Getty Imagesīell hooks taught the world two things: how to critique and how to love.

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.

Bell hooks love book