Love

In All About Love, bell hooks subverts our cultural understandings about love and redefines the concept, challenging readers to rethink their ideas about love so that they can have more of it in their lives. hooks believes that a large part of our inability to love stems from the lack of a proper definition of what love really is, leading to misconceptions and confusion that make the giving and receiving of love difficult or even impossible. This is why she first devotes Chapter 1 of this book to defining the concept of love. In its simplest definition, love is: “the will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth” (35). By defining love in this way, hooks also strongly connects the concept to the theme of spirituality, which she will address more directly in later chapters.

The second critical component...