All About Love: New Visions

This book reads way too much like a self-help number for my liking (there's a lot of references to self-help books in the book too) and though hooks went through some measure of effort to avoid preaching for her own form of faith the amount of references to Christianity and even angels didn't sit quite right with me (it's the ostentation of it that bothers me not so much the religiosity).

There is quite a few references to Erich Fromm (his name is mentioned 12 times in the book) and his influence seems to drip from the page in a way that I would have expected from a college student but not so much from someone with such an eminent reputation as hooks.

There's also a few things that really didn't age well such the aggressive slut shaming of Monica Lewinsky and the victim blaming of Nicole Brown (though that one seemed rather unintentional), sweeping generalizations about men and women with a lack of recognition of how these behaviors are influenced and enforced by our economic system and so on.

While there were a few points which I found interesting it was overall a disappointment.

Okay so, I really liked the first 3 chapters but then it felt like reading a self-help book rather than essays on love. I agree with many things mentioned and raised in this book but I personally didn't feel like there was a lot for me to take away from it and I also didn't always like the way it is written.

So all in all an interesting read and might be a good book for a discussion but maybe not that enjoyable, depending on your taste and expectations.

Inspiring and instructive. It opened my eyes to how capitalism and patriarchal issues have molded and still molds today's society and it helped me see a way out of all these madness, and the answer is love. Not love as an abstract noun but an action based on respect, acceptance and other more concrete nouns. I would have given 5 stars if it wasn't for the last chapter, it seemed it was there just to fill up some pages.