"The word "love" is most often defined as a noun, yet...we would all love to better if we used it as a verb," writes bell hooks as she comes out fighting and on fire in All About Love. Here, at her most provacative and intensely personel, the renowned scholar, cultural critic, and feminist skewers our view of love as romance. In its place she offers a proactive new ethic for a people and a society bereft with lovelessness.

As bell hooks uses her incisive mind and razor-sharp pen to explode th question "What is love?" her answers strike at both the mind and heart. In thirteen concise chapters, hooks examines her own search for emotional connection and society's failure to provide a model for learning to love. Razing the cultural paradigm that the ideal love is infused with sex and desire, she provides a new path to love that is sacred, redemptive, and healing for the individuals and for a nation. The Utne Reader declared bell hooks one of the "100 Visionaries Who Can Change Your Life." All About Love is a powerful affirmation of just how profoundly she can.

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In this attractive South End Press Classics edition, featuring a new preface, hooks maintains that mainstream feminism's reliance on white, middle-class, and professional spokeswomen obscures the centrality of women of color and poor women in the movement for women's liberation....

What does it mean to call a place home? Who is allowed to become a member of a community? When can we say that we truly belong?

These are some of the questions of place and belonging that renowned cultural critic bell hooks examines in her new book, Belonging: A Culture of Place.

Traversing past and present, Belonging charts a cyclical journey in which hooks moves from place to place, from country to city and back again, only to end where she began--her old Kentucky home.

hooks has written provocatively about race, gender, and class; and in this book she turns her attention to focus on issues of land and land ownership. Reflecting on the fact that 90% of all black people lived in the agrarian South before mass migration to northern cities in the early 1900s, she writes about black farmers, about black folks who have been committed both in the past and in the present to local food production, to being organic, and to finding solace in nature. Naturally, it would be impossible to contemplate these issues without thinking about the politics of race and class. Reflecting on the racism that continues to find expression in the world of real estate, she writes about segregation in housing and economic racialized zoning. In these critical essays, hooks finds surprising connections that link of the environment and sustainability to the politics of race and class that reach far beyond Kentucky. With characteristic insight and honesty, Belonging offers a remarkable vision of a world where all people--wherever they may call home--can live fully and well, where everyone can belong....

A genuine feminist politics always brings us from bondage to freedom, from lovelessness to loving....There can be no love without justice.-from the chapter "To Love Again: The Heart of Feminism"

In this engaging and provocative volume, bell hooks introduces a popular theory of feminism rooted in common sense and the wisdom of experience. Hers is a vision of a beloved community that appeals to all those committed to equality, mutual respect, and justice.

hooks applies her critical analysis to the most contentious and challenging issues facing feminists today, including reproductive rights, violence, race, class, and work. With her customary insight and unsparing honesty, hooks calls for a feminism free from divisive barriers but rich with rigorous debate. In language both eye-opening and optimistic, hooks encourages us to demand alternatives to patriarchal, racist, and homophobic culture, and to imagine a different future.

hooks speaks to all those in search of true liberation, asking readers to take look at feminism in a new light, to see that it touches all lives. Issuing an invitation to participate fully in feminist movement and to benefit fully from it, hooks shows that feminism-far from being an outdated concept or one limited to an intellectual elite--is indeed for everybody.

bell hooks is the author of numerous critically acclaimed books on the politics of race, gender, class, and culture. A frequent lecturer in the United States and abroad, she is Distinguished Professor of English at City College, City University of New York....

Renowned visionary and theorist bell hooks began her exploration of the meaning of love in American culture with the critically acclaimed All About Love: New Visions. She continued her national dialogue with the bestselling Salvation: Black People and Love. Now hooks culminates her triumphant trilogy of love with Communion: The Female Search for Love.

Intimate, revealing, provocative, Communion challenges every female to courageously claim the search for love as the heroic journey we must all choose to be truly free. In her trademark commanding and lucid language, hooks explores the ways ideas about women and love were changed by feminist movement, by women's full participation in the workforce, and by the culture of self-help.

Communion is the heart-to-heart talk every woman -- mother, daughter, friend, and lover -- needs to have.

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When Sisters of the Yam: Black Women and Self-Recovery was originally released in 1994, it won critical praise and solidified bell hooks' reputation as one of the leading public intellectuals of her generation. Today, the book is considered a classic in African American and feminist circles.

In Sisters of the Yam, hooks examines how the emotional health of black women is wounded by daily assaults of racism and sexism. Exploring such central life issues as work, beauty, trauma, addiction, eroticism and estrangement from nature, hooks shares numerous strategies for self-recovery and healing. She also shows how black women can empower themselves and effectively struggle against racism, sexism and consumer capitalism.

As hooks' first book on psychological concerns, Sisters of the Yam paved the way for her more recent and popular writing on love, relationships and community. This South End Press Classics Edition will include a new introduction.

Praise for Sisters of the Yam: Black Women and Self-Recovery:

"By confronting topics avoided in polite company-including progressive black folks-hooks helps us tackle our deepest fears, those we harbor about our self-worth as African Americans, and get on with the business of becoming."-Village Voice Literary Supplement

"hooks continues to produce some of the most challenging, insightful, and provocative writing on race and gender in the United States today."-Library Journal

"[bell hooks] draws more effectively on her own experiences and sense of identity than . . . most other writers."-Publishers Weekly

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GRUMP GROAN GROWL

 

Some days the grumpies just take over. So don't let that anger build up--embrace your feelings, overcome your aggression, and be your best self.

 

In other words:

 

 

bell hooks honest text radiates positivity while Chris Raschka's dynamic art adds humor to a book that is perfect for all ages.

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