As soon as upon a time, the philosophy of affection was a positive topic for the person of concepts, like Erich Fromm or C. S. Lewis. In recent years, the topic has been relegated to self-assist, a genre that many distrust for its propensity to suggest easy answers where there are none. Self-assist has its makes use of, Website nonetheless: it neatly undoes the facile concepts of left (we are energyless victims) and right (we've got total agency in our lives) alike, and it supplies the calming reassurance that others on the market are as messed up as you are.

Now comes the feminist cultural critic Bell Hooks with her new book of essays, ''All About Love,'' written in a didactic type that would merge ethical philosophy with self-help. It is a warm affirmation that love is possible and an assault on the culture of narcissism and selfishness. ''We yearn to end the lovelessness that is so pervasive in our society,'' she writes. ''This book tells us easy methods to return to love.''

Her finest factors are easy ones. Neighborhood -- extended family, artistic or political collaboration, associateship -- is as vital because the couple or the nuclear family; love is an artwork that entails work, not just the joys of attraction; desire may rely on illusion, but love comes solely via painful truth-telling; work and money have replaced the values of affection and neighborhood, and this should be reversed.

In Hooks's view, girls have little hope of happiness in a brutal tradition in which they are blindsided because ''most men use psychological terrorism as a approach to subordinate women,'' whom they maintain around ''to care for all their needs.'' Males are raised to be ''more concerned about sexual efficiency and sexual satisfaction than whether they're capable of giving and receiving love.'' Many men ''will, at instances, select to silence a companion with violence moderately than witness emotional vulnerability'' and ''usually flip away from real love and choose relationships in which they can be emotionally withholding after they really feel like it but nonetheless obtain love from someone else.'' Ladies are also afraid of intimacy but ''focus more on discovering a associate,'' regardless of quality. The result is ''a gendered arrangement in which men are more more likely to get their emotional needs met while ladies will likely be deprived. . . . Males are given an advantage that neatly coincides with the patriarchal insistence that they're superior and due to this fact higher suited to rule others.'' Males must learn generosity and ''the joy that comes from service.''

Hooks contends that she and her lengthy-term boyfriends were foiled by ''patriarchal thinking'' and sexist gender roles and by no means had a chance. She is true that many women and men, gay and straight, still fall into traditional traps, however she does not spend much time on why some dive into them, nor does she consider that such shouldn't be everyone's fate. She takes her experience, neatly elides her personal function in shaping it, universalizes and transliterates her frustrations into pop sociology.

Hooks's beliefs for love, her ''new visions,'' sound good, however there may be something sterile and abstract about them. The creative ways the mind has to console itself, the truth that relationships do not grant bliss and perfection, the essential impossibility of satisfaction, how want can conquer the will -- to Hooks, these are however cynical delusions that might be thrust aside in a courageous new world ready ''to affirm mutual love between free women and free men.''

Her invocation of master rhetoricians like Martin Luther King Jr. and Thomas Merton throws into painful relief the strange Pollyanna quality of her prose; it's difficult to imagine either of them beginning a paragraph, as she does, with ''After I first started to talk publicly about my dysfunctional household, my mom was enraged.'' She ends the book as Sleeping Beauty, awaiting ''the love that's promised'' and chatting with angels somewhat than real people. Her book confirms fears about why jargon and prefabricated concepts, together with identification politics and self-assist, so often flatten expertise into cliché. Emotional waters run deep and wide. When one can not navigate them, it is possible to take refuge in a shallow, sentimental idealism.