The Female Search for Love 
 
bell hooks. 
 
William Morrow: 2002. First edition. Hardcover in a jacket. Jacket is tanned along its edges and the spine, and there are groups of small ink stains and smudges on the front cover. Harsh scuffing along one of the bottom boards. Tiny specks of stain on the top-edge of the text block, and the first free endpapers have tanning on the ends. 244 pages. Very good. 
 
The final book in hooks' trilogy on love (All About Love and Salvation came first). hooks asks: what is the role of love in a woman's life? Just how is love the way to true freedom? To answer these questions she traces how the history of feminism has changed the way we understand women. Tied to these inquiries is hooks' classic memoiristic approach, and we reap the benefit. 
 
"By the end of the seventies we had found freedom, but we were still looking for love. We were searching for a love that could embrace the newly invented free women we had become. Whether straight or gay, promiscuous or celibate, we were not sure how to love ourselves as free women or how to create a culture where we could be loved. We had to find a way to redefine our notion of women's liberation so it would include our right to love and be loved."