"A tightly strung, finely tuned memoir about life with her mother."
Angelou (Letters to My Daughter, 2008, etc.) has given us the opportunity to read much of her life, but here she unveils her relationship with her mother for the first time.
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"Into the great religions of the world' is at best tone-deaf and at worst frankly assimilationist. (Picture book/poetry. 6 & up)"
Angelou's poem considers peace as a joyous concept that rises up during the Christmas season, drawing in and including those of all faiths, sweeping everyone along with its power.
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"Angelou is always rewarded by what life gives back in her travels, and in sharing with us such perceptions chanced upon in rich solitude, she startles with her frank, fresh ability to relate in precise prose whatever she learns."
Angelou's (All God's Children Need Traveling Shoes, 1986, etc.) sixth work of autobiographical reflection again treads ballerina-like on the fine line dividing saying too much and not enough on a variety of heartfelt subjects.
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"A fine introduction to these young South Africans. (Nonfiction/Picture book. 4-8)"
A beguiling collaboration between the renowned poet (All God's Children Need Traveling Shoes, 1986, etc.) and a Namibian-born photojournalist.
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"But the mother-son relationship is touchingly explored, the fire of the times is rekindled with eloquence, and Maya herself—brandishing a pistol to defend her son or wrassling with Vus in the Waldorf Astoria lobby—remains funny, tough, and vulnerable as she keeps on surprising herself with what she can do: a great lady moving right on through a great memoir."
Another installment in Angelou's remarkable autobiography—beginning with would-be singer Maya in 1957 California: trying commune life; moving to L.A. with teenage son Guy; playing uneasy hostess to dying Billie Holliday—a "lonely sick woman, with a waterfront mouth" who both cursed and lullabied Guy . . . and interrupted Maya's nightclub act with a mini-review ("Stop that bitch.
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"Like found money, she makes you feel richer for the discovery."
The prolific, resilient Maya Angelou continues her autobiography in this sunny tour of her twenties, covering her first positive contact with whites, a short-lived marriage to a Greek sailor, and the snowballing of her theatrical career.
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"It's all so damned artless, there's just no accounting for how strong she is, except to say Maya's got the gift."
This is Maya Angelou's second volume of poems and her poetry is just as much a part of her autobiography as I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings and Gather Together in My Name.
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"Her own thing on her own terms — worlds removed from Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man carrying his patron's letter, 'keep this nigger running' — and because of it, Angelou's stature, as a writer, a woman, a black, grows, walks tall."
Continuing from the deeply affecting first volume of her autobiography I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1970), Angelou, sixteen, has given birth to her illegitimate son Guy, WW II has just ended, there's optimism in the land and racism, blacks are telling themselves, was only a temporary aberration (didn't we, after all, work together for the defense effort?).
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"Times-Square-Shoe-Shine-Composition' (in a 'Dozens' cadence) and 'The Calling of Names' flash among the serious but less well realized pieces of the second group — but nothing in either is a match for Miss Angelou's prose, where her real poetry flows without restraint."
The natural feeling that made I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings such a special reminiscence gives these verses their claim to poetry.
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"However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time."
Maya Angelou is a natural writer with an inordinate sense of life and she has written an exceptional autobiographical narrative which retrieves her first sixteen years from "the general darkness just beyond the great blinkers of childhood."
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