Leo Buscaglia had an idea. It was to start a class on love. Colleagues asked him what he was thinking, but nevertheless he started one and based on that love class he wrote a book called Love. Dr.
Leo Buscaglia organized his students’ thoughts in a revealing but not so surprising book on the sometimes-uncomfortable subject of love.
When beginning his class at the University of Southern California, Dr. Buscaglia didn’t know how many people to expect. Through the years of teaching this class, he had over 100 students per year. The class was given with no credits but just to discover the wonders of the heart and love. Discussions ranged from self-worth to communication and never failed to keep the mind open and clean.
The idea for the love class may have come to Dr. Buscaglia while studying Buddhism with monks in Japan. He makes many references to Buddha reassuring us that with understanding comes love. He tells his readers that, “Buddha knew the most basic human characteristics; confusion, egocentricity, pride, envy, even indigestion.” All the readers are only human, make mistakes, and have feelings just like great men of the times.
Dr. Buscaglia’s book offers a wide range of how to see and use love. He dwells primarily on the fact that love is a learned phenomenon. This theme carries throughout the book as he opens up to subjects like “Love Knows No Age,” “To Love You Must Free Yourself of Labels,” and “Love Requires One to be Strong.” Every person has his or her different
views, but the book offers guidelines in which many people choose to live by.
After Buscaglia’s first book Love he did not stop writing. He continued on to receive many awards and write many other
books. Many know him as Dr. Hug and his books are widely read throughout the world. They include many different subjects but tend to be fixed on the basics of love.
A major strength of this book was Buscaglia’s ability to use imagery and examples to show the views of love. He uses many real life stories, which a person could relate to. Dr. Buscaglia wants to spread the word of love and increase love in the world. In this book he uses his positive examples to show how love works.
A weakness of the book Love is that Buscaglia tends to be repetitive at times. After reading the forward a person hardly has to read the book as a whole. He gets trapped into repeating the same things and soon runs out of new things to say. Although he does bring up good points, he sometimes fails to back them up with new information.
The love class that helped create the book Love most likely benefited tremendously from the class. After reading this book a person can realize that he is the only thing standing between himself and his ability to love. Before you can love others you must love yourself and after reading Love you will be able to build on this. Hopefully the reader will be pulled into Buscaglia’s world and keep with this. Love was sometimes hard to keep reading because of it’s repetitiveness but in all it will teach you some meaningful possibilities of the betterment of life and love.