Editor's Note:

In the last issue (81) we published the book review below using the traditional way of capitalizing names and words. This did not do justice to bell hooks and her book's intentions. Below is an explanation of hooks' spelling and Silvia Echevarria-Doan's book review. We apologize for the error.

Hooks is committed to her ideas and that is evident in her use of a pseudonym. Hooks decided to use a pseudonym both to honor her grandmother (whose name she took) and her mother, but also because the name Gloria (her given name) became associated with an identity that was not completely hers. By using "bell hooks," she was able to reclaim her voice and identity. It is hooks's commitment to her ideas, however, that led her to decapitalize her name. Both the decapitalization and the pseudonym itself are attempts to take the reader's focus away from the author and place it on the content of the work. For hooks, her ideas come first and foremost, before her name and personal identity.

AFTA Newsletter Book Review

Silvia Echevarria-Doan, PhD

about love: new visions — by bell hooks (2000)

Courage does not even begin to describe what it takes to write about love, an elusive and often indescribable emotion, act, and experience that touches us all. bell hooks accepted the challenge because she believes that our nation is turning away from love. Being the social critic and thinker that she is, she found it disillusioning when she was not able to find a "tell-us-all-about-love-book" herself. This came at a time when she and her most intimate listener and lover (with whom she had endless discussions about love) were breaking up. In continuing her search for answers through questions and conversations around the nation she was struck with our own cultural confusion about love. It was out of this search and struggle that "all about love" was born.

The book addresses a number of different forms of love starting with very personal and sometimes rather dark renditions of hooks' own childhood (and later adult) experiences of love. Along with several different aspects of love such as honesty, values, justice, commitment, loss, mutuality, and spirituality, she also discusses the act and experience of love within the context of romance, mutuality, community, greed, loss, healing, and destiny. It is in her convincing critique of our current views on romance, that she presents her well-established feminist self. She does so by making some very strong assertions that would have us changing our entire culture and language of romantic love. For instance, she believes that we should change our language of "falling in love" (which liberates us from the responsibility of our actions and takes away choice), to "choosing to love." Thus, implying a more active and responsible act. hooks borrows her definition of love from Scott Peck by describing it as " the will to nurture one's own or another's spiritual growth."

Throughout the book, bell hooks presents most of her thoughts about love in terms of that which gets in its way (i.e. obstacles) and that which generates it (generative resources). Obstacles range from religious segregation to our worship of individuation and our culture of several "ism's"—narcissism, sexism, and consumerism. Fear, another obstacle, is viewed as "the primary force that upholds structures of domination" because it promotes separation and sameness, thus "making difference, of any kind, appear as a threat." In referring to her own family as "dysfunctional," hooks also addresses how confused messages about love in such families can also lead us to lovelessness and disconnectedness. It is this disconnectedness and isolation, that hooks believes, has led us to our current hunger for spirituality.

It is not surprising then that most of the generative sources of love she discusses center around spirituality in the form of loving practice, communalism, and healthy interdependence. Although she borrows from, and cites, several different spiritual writers in her work (e.g. Merton, Peck, Kornfield, Williamson, Viorst, and Salzberg, among others), many of her thoughts are founded in Buddhist thinking and practice.

Even though the book may seem to be a "fast read," I found it worked best for me to digest it slowly and in small chunks, for two reasons. Quite simply, it was my way of limiting the bad, painfully negative parts and extending the good, inspirational parts. In other words, a "slower read" curbed some of hooks' negativity and somewhat slanted views to limited doses, while, in contrast, it extended her beautifully written nuggets of enlightenment and hope. It was in words like "we too can choose serenity in the midst of struggle" that I found reassurance, peace, and nurturance. I think that is hooks' gift to us in her book, her own hope that true love is felt and found.