All about love by bell hooks free pdf download

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. Breakthrough courses are aimed at adult education classes and also at the self-study learner.

Each course offers authentic, lively, conversational language through a coherent and carefully structured approach. The books are in full colour with attractive photographs and artwork giving a real sense of the country and its culture. There are four hours of audio material to accompany this course available in cassette and audio CD format.

The new edition has been brought up to date with the inclusion of the Euro, and there is also a comprehensive companion website offering both teacher and student a wealth of extra resources including on line multi-choice exercises. The narrator arrives in Berlin, a place famed for its hedonism, to find peace and maybe love; only to discover that the problems which have long haunted him have arrived there too, and are more present than ever. With the world as a whole more uncertain, as both the far-right and global temperatures rise at frightening speed, he finds himself fighting a fierce inner battle against his turbulent past, for a future free of his fear of failure, of persecution, and of intimacy.

In The End, It Was All About Love is a journey of loss and self-acceptance that takes its nameless narrator all the way through bustling Berlin to his roots, a quiet village on the Uganda-Sudan border. It is a bracingly honest story of love, sexuality and spirituality, of racism, dating, and alienation; of fleeing the greatest possible pain, and of the hopeful road home.

Tanveer Singh is a law student based in Ludhiana. A topper in academics, he has participated in various debates and seminars, and has been consistently good sportsman representing his college as well as the State in Hammer Throw in various athletic meets. He aspires to be an eminent Jurist or civil servant and wants to work for Human Rights. He wishes to explore issues which have been neglected thus far and try to unveil their positive aspects to that social equality and justice prevail. Renowned visionary and theorist bell hooks began her exploration of the meaning of love in American culture with the critically acclaimed bestseller All About Love: New Visions.

She continued her national dialogue with the bestselling Salvation: Black People and Love. Intimate, revealing, provocative, Communion challenges every woman 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 the 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.

She is funny, smart, and explosively engaged in the wonders and weirdness of the world. But what makes this memoir more than mere entertainment is the mature and sophisticated evolution that Alderton describes in these pages. I loved it. In her memoir, she vividly recounts falling in love, finding a job, getting drunk, getting dumped, realizing that Ivan from the corner shop might just be the only reliable man in her life, and that absolutely no one can ever compare to her best girlfriends.

Everywhere we learn that love is im- portant, and yet we are bombarded by its failure. In the realm of the political, among the religious, in our families, and in our romantic lives, we see little indication that love informs decisions, strengthens our understanding of com- munity, or keeps us together. This bleak picture in no way alters the nature of our longing.

We still hope that love will prevail. We still believe in love's promise. Just as the graffiti proclaimed, our hope lies in the re - ality that so many of us continue to believe in love's power. We believe it is important to know love. We be- lieve it is important to search for love's truths. This despair about love is coupled with a callous cynicism that frowns upon any suggestion that love is as important as work , as crucial to our survival as a nation as the drive to succeed.

Awesomely, our na- tion, like no other in the world, is a culture driven by the quest to love it's the theme of our movies, music, litera- ture even as it offers so little opportunity for us to un- derstand love's meaning or to know how to realize love in word and deed. O ur nation is equally driven by sexual obsession. There is no aspect of sexuality that is not studied, talked about, or demonstrated. How-to classes exist for every dimension of sexuality, even masturbation.

Yet schools for love do not exist. Everyone assumes that we will know how to love instinctively. Despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, we still accept that the family is the primary school for love. Those of us who do not learn how to love among family are expected to experience love in romantic relationships. H owever, this love often eludes us. And we spend a lifetime undoing the damage caused by cruelty, neglect, and all manner of lovelessness experienced in our fam ilies of origin and in relationships where we simply did not know what to do.

Only love can heal the wounds of the past. To open our hearts more fully to love's power and grace we must dare to acknowledge how little we know of love in both theory and practice. We must face the confusion and disappointment that much of what we were taught about the nature of love makes no sense when applied to daily life. Contemplating the practice of love in everyday life, thinking about how we love and what is needed for ours to become a culture where love's sacred presence can be felt everywhere, I wrote this meditation.

As the title All About Love: New Visions indicates, we want to live in a culture where love can flourish. We yearn to end the lovelessness that is so pervasive in our society. This book tells us how to return to love. All About Love: New Visions provides radical new ways to think about the art of loving, offering a hopeful, joyous vision of love's transformative power. It lets us know what we must do to love again. Gathering love 's wisdom, it lets us know what we must do to be touched by love's grace.

We treat it as if it were an o bscenity. We reluctantly admit to it. Even saying the word makes us stumble and blush Love is the most important thing in our lives, a pas- sion for which we would fight or die, and yet we ' re reluctant to linger over its names.

W ithout a supple vocabulary, we can ' t even talk or think about it directly. They are wary because they believe women make too much of love. And they know that what we think love means is not al - ways what they believe it means. Our confusion about what we mean when we use the word "love" is the source of our difficulty in loving.

If our society had a commonly held understanding of the meaning of love, the act of lov- ing would not be so mystifying. Dictionary definitions of love tend to emphasize romantic love, defining love first and foremost as "profoundly tender, passionate affection for another person, especially when based on sexual at- traction. However, deep affection does not really ade- quately describe love's meaning. OVE hard to avoid giving clear definitions.

Yet she is not alone in writing of love in ways that cloud our understanding. When the very meaning of the word is cloaked in mystery, it should not come as a surprise that most people find it hard to define what they mean when they use the word "love. The word "love" is most often defined as a noun, yet all the more astute theorists of love acknowledge that we would all love better if we used it as a verb.

I spent years search- ing for a meaningful definition of the word "love," and was deeply relieved when I found one in psychiatrist M. Echoing the work of Erich Fromm, he defines love as "the will to extend one's self for the purpose of nurturing one's own or another's spiritual growth. Will also implies choice. We do not have to love. We choose to love.

Everyone who has witnessed the growth process of a child from the moment of birth on sees clearly that before language is known, before the identity of caretakers is rec- ognized, babies respond to affectionate care. Usually they respond with sounds or looks of pleas ure. As they grow older they respond to affectionate care by giving affection, cooing at the sight of a welcomed caretaker.

Affection is only one ingredient of love. To truly love we must learn to mix various ingredients-care, affection, recognition, respect, commitment, and trust, as well as honest and open communication. Learning faulty definitions of love when we are quite young makes it difficult to be loving as we grow older. We start out committed to the right path but go in the wrong direction. Most of us learn early on to think of love as a feeling. When we feel deeply drawn to someone, we cathect with them; that is, we invest feel- ings or emotion in them.

That process of investment wherein a loved one becomes important to us is called "cathexis. Since their feeling is that of cathexis, they insist that what they feel is love. When we understand love as the will to nurture our own and another's spiritual growth, it becomes clear that we cannot claim to love if we are hurtful and abusive.

Love and abuse cannot coexist. Abuse and neglect are, by definition, the opposites of nurturance and care. Often we hear of a man who beats his children and wife and then goes to the corner bar and passionately proclaims how much he loves them. If you talk to the wife on a good day, she may also insist he loves her, despite his violence.

For most folks it is just too threat- ening to embrace a definition of love that would no longer enab le us to see love as present in our fa milies. Too many of us need to cling to a notion of love that either makes abuse acceptable or at least makes it seem that whatever happened was not that bad. Raised in a fami ly in which aggress ive shaming and ver- bal humiliation coexisted with lots of affection and care, I had difficulty em bracing the term "dysfunctional.

I did not want my parents to think I was disparaging them; I was apprecia tive of all the good things that they had given in the family. W ith therapeutic help I was ab le to see t he term "dysfunctional" as a useful descriptio n and not as an absolute negative judgment. My family of origin pro- vided, throughout m y childhood, a dysfunctional setting and it remains one.

T his does not mean that it is not also a setting in which affection, delight, and care are present. On any day in my family of origin I might have been given caring attention w herein my being a smart girl was affirmed and encouraged.

Then, hours later, I would be told that it was precisel y beca use I th ought r was so smart that I was likely to go crazy and be put in a mental insti- tution where no one would visi t me. Not surprisingly, this odd mixture of care and unkindness did not positively nurture the growth of my spirit.

Apply ing Peck's definition of love to my child hood experience in my house hold of origin, I could not hon estly describe it as loving. Pressed in therapy to describe my house hold of origin in terms of whether it was loving or not, I pai nfully ad - mitted that I did not feel loved in our household but that I did feel ca red for.

And outside my household of origin I felt genuinely loved by individual family membe rs, like my grandfather. I am grateful to have been raised in a family that was caring, and strongly believe that had my parents been loved we ll by their parents they would have given that love to their chil- dren.

They gave what they had been gi ven-ca re. Remem - ber, care is a dimension of love, but simply giving care does not mean we are loving. In my case, the more successful I became, the more I wanted to cease speaking the truth about my child- hood. Often, critics of self-help literature and recovery pro- grams like to make it seem that far too many of us are eager to embrace the belief that our families of origins were, are, or remain dysfunctional and lacking in love but I have found that, like myself, most people, whether ra ised in an exces- sive ly violent or abusive home or not, shy away from em- bracing an y negative critique of our experie nces.

Usually, it requires some therapeutic intervention, whether through lit- erature that teaches and enlightens us or therapy, before many of us can even begin to critically examine childhood experiences and acknowledge the ways in which they have had an impact on our adult behavior. And in extreme cases that abuse is an expression of love. This faulty thinking often shapes our adult perceptions of love.

So that just as we would cling to the notion that those who hurt us as children loved us, we try to rationalize being hurt by other adults by insisting that th ey love us. In my case, many of the negative sham- ing practices I was subjected to in childhood continued in my romantic adult relationships. Initially, I did not want to accept a definition of love that would also compel me to face the possibility that I had not known love in the relationships that were most primary to me.

Years of therapy and critical reflection enabled me to accept that there is no stigma attached to acknowledging a lack of love in one's primary rela tionships. And if one's goal is self-recovery, to be well in one's soul, honestly and real- istica lly con fronting lovelessness is part of the healing process. A lack of sustained love does not mean the ab- sence of care, affection, or pleasure.

In fa ct, my long-term rom antic re latio nships, like the bonds in my family, have been so full of ca re that it would be quite easy to overlook the ongoing emotional dysfunction. In order to change the lovelessness in my primary rela - tionships, I had to first learn anew the meaning of love and from there learn how to be loving. Like many who read The Road Less Traveled again and again, I am grateful to have been given a definition of love that helped me face the places in my life where love was lacking.

I was in my mid-twenties when I first learned to understand love " as the will to extend one's self for the purpose of nur- turing one's own or another's spiritual growth.

One pattern that made the practice of love especially difficult was my constantly choosing to be with men who were emotionally wounded, who were not that interested in be- ing loving even though they desired to be loved. I wanted to know love but I was afraid to surrender and trust another person.

I was afraid to be intimate. By choosing men who were not interested in being loving, I was able to practice giving love, but always within an un- fufilling context.

Naturally, my need to receive love was not met. I got what I was accustomed to getting-care and affection, usually mingled with a degree of unkind - ness, neglect, and, on some occasions, outright cruelty. At times I was unkind. It took me a long time to recognize that while I wanted to know love, I was afraid to be truly intimate. Many of us choose relationships of affection and care that will never become loving because they feel safer.

The demands are not as intense as loving requires. The risk is not as great. Even though we are obsessed with the ide a of love, the truth is that most of us live relatively decent, some- what satisfying lives even if we often feel that love is lack- ing. For most of us, that fee ls like enough because it is usually a lot more than we received in our fam ilies of origin.

Undoubtedly, many of us are more comfortab le with the notion that love can mean anything to anybody precisely because when we define it w it h precision and clarity it brings us fac e to face with our lacks-with ter- rible alienation. The truth is, far too many people in our culture do not know what love is. And this not knowing feels like a terrible secret, a lack t hat we have to cover up.

H ad I been given a clear definiti on of love earlier in my life it would not have taken me so long to become a more loving person. Had I shared with others a common un- derstanding of what it mea ns to love it wo uld have been easier to create love. It is particularly distressing that so many recent books on love continue to insist that defini- ti ons of love are unnecessary and meaningless. O r worse, the authors suggest love should mean something different to men than it does to women- that the sexes should re- spect and adapt to our inability to comm unicate since we do not share the same language.

This type of literature is popular beca use it does not demand a change in fixed ways of thinking about gender roles, culture, or love. Women, more so than men , rush out to purchase this literature.

We do so because collectively we are concerned about lovelessness. Since many women believe they will never know fulfilling love, they are willing to settle for strategies that help ease the pain and increase the peace, pleasure, and playfulness in existing relationships, particu- larly romantic ones. No vehicle in our culture exists for readers to talk back to the writers of this literature. And we do not really know if it has been truly useful, if it promotes constructive change.

The fact that women, more than men, buy self-help books, using our consumer dollars to keep specific books on bestseller lists, is no indication that these books actually help us transform our lives. I have bought tons of self-help books. Only a very few have really made a difference in my life.

This is true for many readers. The lack of an ongomg public discussion and public policy about the practice of love in our culture and in our lives means that we still look to books as a primary source of guidance and direction.

Large numbers of readers em- brace Peck's definition of love and are applying it to their lives in ways that are helpful and transformative. When we intervene on mystifying assumptions that love cannot be defined by offering workable, useful definitions, we are al- ready creating a context where love can begin to flourish.

Some folks have difficulty with Peck's definition of love because he uses the word "spiritual. An individual does not need to be a believer in a religion to embrace the idea that there is an animating principle in the self-a life force some of us call it soul that when nurtured enhances our capacity to be more fully self-actualized and able to engage in communion with the world around us. To begin by always thinking of love as an action rather than a feeling is one way in which anyone using the word in this manner automatically assumes accountability and responsibility.

We are often taught we have no control over our "feelings. We also accept that our actions have consequences. To think of actions shaping fee lings is one way we rid our- selves of conventionally accepted assumptions such as that parents love their children, or that one simply "falls" in love without exercising will or choice, that there are such things as "crimes of passion," i. If we were constantly remembering that love is as love does, we would not use the word in a manner that devalues and degrades its meaning.

When we are loving we openly and honestly express care, affection, responsibility, respect, commitment, and trust. Definitions are vital starting points for the imagination. What we cannot imagine cannot come into being.

A good definition marks our starting point and lets us know where we want to end up. As we move toward our desired des- tination we chart the journey, creating a map. We need a map to guide us on our journey to love-starting with the place where we know what we mean when we speak of love. The [parent-child] bond which teaches us how to love.

We cannot be whole human beings- indeed, we may find it hard to be human- without the sustenance of this firs t attachment. Wheth" our homes are happy or troubled, our families functional or dysfunctional, it's the original school of love.

I cannot remember ever wanting to ask my parents to define love. To my child's mind love was the good feeling you got when family treated you like you mattered and you treated them like they mattered. Love was always and only about good feeling. In early adolescence when we were whipped and told that these punishments were "for our own good " or "I'm doing this because I love you," my siblings and I were confused.

Why was harsh punishment a gesture of love? As children do, we pretended to accept this grown- up logic; but we knew in our hearts it was not right. We knew it was a lie. Just like the lie the grown-ups told when they explai ned after harsh punishment, "It hurts me more than it hurts you. Such children learn early on to question the meaning of love, to yearn for love even as they doubt it exists.

On the flip side there are masses of children who grow up confident love is a good feeling who are never pun- ished, who are allowed to believe that love is only about getting your needs met, your desires satisfied. In their child's minds love is not about what they have to give, love is mos tly something given to them. When children like these are overindulged either materially or by being allowed to act out, this is a form of neglect.

These chil- dren, though not in any way abused or uncared for, are usually as unclear about love's meaning as their neglected and emotionally abandoned counterparts. Both groups have learned to think about love primarily in relation to good fe elings, in the context of reward and punishment. From early childhood on, most of us remember being told we were loved when we did things pleasing to our parents.

And we learned to give them affirmations of love when they pleased us. As children grow they associate love more with acts of attention, affection, and caring.

They still see parents who attempt to satisfy their desires as giving love. Children from all classes tell me that they love their parents and are loved by them, even those who are being hurt or abused. They will say, "My mommy loves me 'cause she takes care of me and helps me do everything right. The no- tion that love is a bout getting what one wants, whether it's a hug or a new sweater or a trip to Disneyland, is a way of thinking about love that makes it difficult for chil- dren to acquire a deeper emotional understanding.

We like to imagine that most children will be born into homes where they will be loved. But love will not be pres- ent if the grown-ups who parent do not how to love. Al- though lots of children are raised in homes where they are given some degree of care, love may not be sustained or even present.

Adults across lines of class, race, and gender indict the family. T heir testimony conveys worlds of child- hood where love was lacking-where chaos, neglect, abuse, and coercion reigned supreme. Every day thousands of children in our culture are verbally and physically abused, starved, to rture d, and murdered. They are the true victims of intimate terrorism in that they have no collective voice and no rights. They remain the property of parenting adults to do with as they will.

There can be no love without justice. In our culture the private family dwell ing is the one institu- tionalized sphere of power tha t can easily be autocratic and fascisti c. As absolute rulers, parents can usually decide without any intervention what is best for their children. Spirit, struggle, service, love, the ideals of shared knowledge and shared learning - these values motivate progressive social change. Teachers of vision know that democratic education can never be confined to a classroom.

Teaching - so often undervalued in our society -- can be a joyous and inclusive activity. According to the Washington Post, no one who cares about contemporary African-American cultures can ignore bell hooks' electrifying feminist explorations. Targeting cultural icons as diverse as Madonna and Spike Lee, Outlaw Culture presents a collection of essays that pulls no punches. And intervene, challenge and change is what hooks does best.

First published in Written from both historical and cultural perspectives, Salvation takes an incisive look at the transformative power of love in the lives of African Americans.

Whether talking about the legacy of slavery, relationships and marriage in Black life, the prose and poetry of Martin Luther King, Jr. Combining the passionate politics of W. Her writings on love and its impact on race, class, family, history, and popular culture will help us heal and create beloved American communities. Skip to content. All About Love. All About Love Book Review:.

The Will to Change. The Will to Change Book Review:. When Angels Speak of Love. Communion Book Review:. Teaching Critical Thinking. Teaching Critical Thinking Book Review:. We Real Cool. We Real Cool Book Review:. Shifting the Center Understanding Contemporary Families. You don't know it yet, but it's likely you need this book. Emily May I was hesitant to buy All About Love: New Visionsthis release based on some of the reviews but finally decided to pull the trigger. This book seemed like the only official publication that was going to give me that so I finally bought it.

Like this duology has totally filled my creative well. Share Article:. Kamal Kamal Dewangan is not tech savvy, Kamal try to provide all types of pdf for free and always try to get update pdf books and all. Leave a Reply Cancel reply Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment. Of Pages: