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sethdmichaels.bsky.social · @sethdmichaels.bsky.social@bridge.neodb.net

Rated All About Love: New Visions 8/10

This is something of a challenging book for me - not because it's hard reading, at all, nor because I disagree with the concepts and ideas, far from it! - but because it's so deeply earnest and warm and flowery that I find myself detaching from it, then stepping back further and interrogating why I'm resistant to it. At moments I'm thinking "gosh, I wish I'd read this when I was younger, I want to buy it for people" and at other moments I'm rolling my eyes. It's some things I don't like - corny, self-helpy, abstract - but it's worth it, I think, to push through and try to absorb the point. Indeed, it challenges my habit of ironic distance very directly. (The experience of reading it is a little like the experience of reading Solnit's "Hope in the Dark," only more so.) It definitely draws on therapeutic, self-help, and even new-agey ways of thinking - hooks is a sociologist and it almost acts as a kind of literature review of contemporary self-help books. It's also very much of its time; it was written in 1999 when the big proximate news event was the Clinton impeachment, and that set of concerns feels like another planet now, even as some of the trends she worries about with atomization and technology have accelerated since. I could probably write a couple of essays about the pluses and minuses of this book, what it evoked in me, but suffice it to say, I'm glad I read it but I suggest reading it with an eye specifically to the ways it makes you feel uncomfortable.

#book

Published 2026-08-18 14:46 UTC · bridged from Atmosphere