User Profile

All About Love is everything Radikale Zärtlichkeit fails to be. Courageous, risky, introspective. As usual, bell hooks' writing is clear and deep.

For the hype this book has gotten among leftists, it is pretty underwhelming. The best way I can think to describe it is: risk-averse. Too cowardly for hot takes, just the mildest, tamest takes, no deep interaction with other texts, only shallow commenting and paraphrasing (of Marx, Fromm, hooks...), no originality. I did like the autobiographical bits; if those had taken up more space, if Kurt had taken the risk of getting more personal, more introspective, that would have made up for the theoretical shallowness of the text.

What it says on the tin. History of German feminism, no more no less. It's fine.

The author's liberal views are annoying, but besides that this is a good read. She deconstructs the myth that Alice Schwarzer has built around herself. She is good at contextualizing Schwarzer's views in the broader field of feminist theories. The book also offers a fairly detailed and entertaining history of (esp. German) feminism.

This book meant a lot to me when I first read it as a young 20-something coming to understand my lived experience through a feminist lens. Rereading it now, it feels less intimately connected to me but remains an interesting piece of 70s feminist literature.