In Hooks's view, women have little hope of happiness in a brutal culture in which they are blindsided because ''most men use psychological terrorism as a way to subordinate women,'' whom they keep around ''to take care of all their needs.'' Men are raised to be ''more concerned about sexual performance and sexual satisfaction than whether they are capable of giving and receiving love.'' Many men ''will, at times, choose to silence a partner with violence rather than witness emotional vulnerability'' and ''often turn away from true love and choose relationships in which they can be emotionally withholding when they feel like it but still receive love from someone else.'' Women are also afraid of intimacy but ''focus more on finding a partner,'' regardless of quality. Community - extended family, creative or political collaboration, friendship - is as important as the couple or the nuclear family love is an art that involves work, not just the thrill of attraction desire may depend on illusion, but love comes only through painful truth-telling work and money have replaced the values of love and community, and this must be reversed. ''This book tells us how to return to love.'' ''We yearn to end the lovelessness that is so pervasive in our society,'' she writes. It is a warm affirmation that love is possible and an attack on the culture of narcissism and selfishness. Now comes the feminist cultural critic Bell Hooks with her new book of essays, ''All About Love,'' written in a didactic style that would merge moral philosophy with self-help. Self-help has its uses, however: it neatly undoes the facile ideas of left (we are powerless victims) and right (we have total agency in our lives) alike, and it provides the calming reassurance that others out there are as messed up as you are. In recent years, the topic has been relegated to self-help, a genre that many distrust for its propensity to propose simple answers where there are none. ONCE upon a time, the philosophy of love was a fine subject for the man of ideas, like Erich Fromm or C.

All about love