Chapter Two, Justice: Childhood Love Lessons, describes that love and abuse cannot coexist, and justice is necessary for love to break down power imbalances. Chapter One, Clarity: Give Love Words, highlights the absent definition of love and aims to define it to provide a roadmap for the journey towards love. Each of the chapters is named and based on the tenants of love that hooks names as ingredients for love: care, affection, recognition, respect, commitment, and trust, as well as honest and open communication. In thirteen chapters, All About Love engages the reader with love’s wisdom to be touched by love’s graces. This book provides readers a new perspective through “radical new ways to think about the art of loving, offering a hopeful, joyous, vision of love’s transformative power.”

Third, hooks details the genealogy of love, again contending with the gendered expectations and the contradictions surrounding and accepting that we know so little about love in theory and in practice. Second, she presents that love as a theoretical concept is often narrated by men, whereas women are expected to be the practitioners of love. Conceived by the necessity of a definition for love, in the midst of an increasingly loveless society, this tells us “how to return to love.” First, hooks contends with the cynicism surrounding love in popular culture, to name that many people use that cynicism to mask their fear of disappointment and heartbreak. All About Love is an important contribution that seeks to fill a long-existing gap in the literature on love, especially through the perspective of a woman.

Bell hooks love