Salvation: Black People and Love

From Publishers Weekly
"The transformative power of love is the foundation of all meaningful social change," contends hooks in this impassioned plea to embattled African-American communities to embrace love as a force for change. Returning to the subject of last year's All About Love, this leading feminist scholar focuses this time on a love ethic that, she maintains, has the potential to undo the long-term effects of neglect, poverty and despair. As in other recent books on black relationships (such as George Edmond Smith and Gwendolyn Goldsby Grant's More Than Sex), hooks refutes the myth stemming from the time of slavery that black people haven't attempted to normalize their lives, citing documentation of familial love and strong community ties. Much of the conflict in relationships between black men and women can be linked, she suggests, to the sense of loss and abandonment arising from increasingly fractured black families; as a result, many members of the hip-hop generation mistrust love. Although hooks covers overworked turf in her chapters on self-love, her flair for crisp writing surfaces again in her celebration of black women's propensity for cultivating love in their communities and in her stinging arguments against the scapegoating of black single mothers. In the later chapters, hooks reaches beyond the theoretical to address various walks of black life. Her fans will delight in her array of cultural references, from Zora Neale Hurston, Cornel West and Erich Fromm to Eldridge Cleaver, Olga Silverstein and Lil' Kim. Despite recent criticism that hooks may have lost some of her bite, this book provides ample evidence to the contrary. (Feb. 1 Forecast: Though it won't defend hooks from the charge that she is rewriting the same book, this effort is more focused and potent that her last. Supported by an 11-city tour that will include events that play to her following among college students, this title should keep hooks's fans satisfied. Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
Feminist scholar hooks (All About Love), who believes that there is a crisis of "lovelessness" in the black community, continues her exploration of love with a different slant: she addresses its meaning in black experience today and offers a plan of action for "black survivial and self-determination." At the heart of the matter are poor neighborhoods that were once lively but are now deserted, a lack of spirituality, an emphasis on gaining material things, and the resulting collapse of community. Hooks also covers the issues of self-love, single mothers, black masculinity, heterosexual love, and homosexual love. She appeals to Martin Luther King, Cornel West, writer June Jordan, and others for words of wisdom in this well-written and informative work. Ultimately, she urges African Americans to return to love, the clear path to healing our wounded environment. A welcome addition to most academic and some public libraries.-DAnn Burns, "Library Journal" Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Booklist
When hooks spoke to students about her last groundbreaking book, All about Love [BKL Ja 1 & 15 00], she was distressed to hear black children "express their deep conviction that love does not exist." The result of her quest to understand this "crisis of lovelessness" is a frank and hard-hitting, psychologically acute, and beautifully crafted treatise on the meaning of love and why it's essential to a healthy society. Citing racism as the source of love's devaluation--How do you teach black children about love in a world in which some people are considered less than fully human?-- hooks observes that survival itself has required so much effort for black Americans that the expression of love is often given short shrift. She also makes some bracing observations about how sexism and materialism diminish love's vitality. Readers of every hue will benefit from hooks' piercing insights into the troubled state of our collective soul and find solace in her belief that "love is our hope and salvation." Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved


Book Description
Acclaimed visionary and intellectual bell hooks began her exploration of the meaning of love in American culture with the bestselling All About Love: New Visions. Here she continues her love song to the nation in the groundbreaking and soul-stirring Salvation: Black People and Love.Whether talking about the legacy of slavery, relationships and marriage in Black life, the prose and poetry of our most revered artists and leaders, the liberation movements of the 1950s, '60s, and '70s, or hip-hop and gangsta rap culture, hooks lets us know what love's got to do with it.Salvation is work that helps us heal -- and shows us how to create beloved American communities.


About the Author
Bell Hooks is a cultural critic, feminist theorist, and writer. Celebrated as one of our nation's leading public intellectual by The Atlantic Monthly, as well as one of Utne Reader's 100 Visionaries Who Could Change Your Life, she is a charismatic speaker who divides her time among teaching, writing, and lecturing around the world. Previously a professor in the English departments at Yale University and Oberlin College, hooks is now a Distinguished Professor of English at City College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. She is the author of more than seventeen books, including All About Love: New Visions; Remembered Rapture: The Writer at Work; Wounds of Passion: A Writing Life; Bone Black: Memories of Girlhood; Killing Rage: Ending Racism; Art on My Mind: Visual Politics; and Breaking Bread: Insurgent Black Intellectual Life. She lives in New York City.


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A manual for fixing our culture. . . . In writing that is elegant and penetratingly simple, [hooks] gives voice to some things we may know in our hearts but need an interpreter like her to help process. hooks unflinchingly maps out how these patterns . . . contribute to the still-troubling status of African Americans today. One of the book's major contributions . . . is its probing analysis of how the mass media'entertainment and news'helps to shape what we think about ourselves and what others think of us. Read all 7 "From The Critics" >


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