As soon as upon a time, the philosophy of love was a superb topic for the person of ideas, like Erich Fromm or C. S. Lewis. In recent times, the subject has been relegated to self-assist, a genre that many mistrust for its propensity to propose simple answers where there are none. Self-assist has its uses, nonetheless: it neatly undoes the facile ideas of left (we are energyless victims) and right (we have now total company in our lives) alike, and it gives the calming reassurance that others out there are as messed up as you are.

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

Her finest points are simple ones. Group -- extended household, artistic or political collaboration, palship -- is as essential because the couple or the nuclear household; love is an artwork that entails work, not just the joys of attraction; need could depend on illusion, however love comes solely by painful reality-telling; work and cash have replaced the values of affection and group, and this should be reversed.

In Hooks's view, ladies have little hope of happiness in a brutal tradition in which they're blindsided because ''most males use psychological terrorism as a method to subordinate ladies,'' whom they maintain round ''to take care of all their needs.'' Men are raised to be ''more involved 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 accomplice with violence relatively than witness emotional vulnerability'' and ''often flip away from real love and choose relationships in which they can be emotionally withholding when they really feel prefer it however still obtain love from someone else.'' Women are additionally afraid of intimacy but ''focus more on finding a accomplice,'' regardless of quality. The result's ''a gendered arrangement in which males are more likely to get their emotional wants met while women 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 better suited to rule others.'' Men have to learn generosity and ''the enjoyment that comes from service.''

Hooks contends that she and her two lengthy-term boyfriends had been foiled by ''patriarchal thinking'' and sexist gender roles and never had a chance. She is correct that many men and women, homosexual and straight, still fall into traditional traps, but she does not spend a lot time on why some dive into them, nor does she consider that such is just not everyone's fate. She takes her expertise, neatly elides her own function in shaping it, universalizes and transliterates her frustrations into pop sociology.

Hooks's beliefs for love, her ''new visions,'' sound good, but there may be something sterile and summary about them. The creative methods the thoughts has to console itself, the truth that relationships do not grant bliss and perfection, the essential impossibility of satisfaction, how desire can conquer the will -- to Hooks, these are however cynical delusions that will probably be thrust aside in a brave 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 troublesome to imagine both of them beginning a paragraph, as she does, with ''Once I first started to speak publicly about my dysfunctional family, my mom was enraged.'' She ends the book as Sleeping Beauty, awaiting ''the love that is promised'' and chatting with angels slightly than real people. Her book confirms fears about why jargon and prefabricated concepts, including id politics and self-help, so usually flatten expertise into cliché. Emotional waters run deep and wide. When one can not navigate them, it is doable to take refuge in a shallow, sentimental idealism.