bell hooks’ The Will to Change wasn’t just a good book in a sense that books can be quantified in such a manner. It was one that shifted my paradigm and also affirmed me in so many ways. As lauded as that one is, All About Love is considered her seminal text and is, to borrow a phrase from current parlance, having a moment. It’s been largely reissued and reintroduced to a new generation of readers.
Once I got over what I wanted it to be and appreciated it for what it is, I loved it.
hooks has a lot of overlap from Will to Change in this one, only she goes broader into the specific ways in which women and men need to be loved. She’s very good at identifying how societal problems impact us as individuals and how we turn that hurt onto our communities. Eschewing highfalutin arguments, I’ve always appreciated bell hooks because she makes these in a way that sound like someone pleading for a better world that is tangible and real.
The issue I had with this book is there’s a lot of redundancy in her arguments. While I agreed with almost all of them*, their themes kept coming up in different chapters, thus sometimes diluting the strength of the individual arguments she wanted to make in each respective chapter. I also knew a lot of her approach already from previous works so there wasn’t much new or that I couldn’t otherwise anticipate.
Nevertheless, as I said, once I appreciated what the book was, I loved it. I think it’s a great gateway to her work if you haven’t read any already. And I think we would be better off as a race if we embraced its tenets in our every day lives.
*Though, oof, did she bruise Monica Lewinsky pretty bad here.