A Song Flung Up to Heaven
-
- £2.99
-
- £2.99
Publisher Description
A memoir of politics and activism, from the bestselling and beloved author of I KNOW WHY THE CAGED BIRD SINGS
'A brilliant writer, a fierce friend and a truly phenomenal woman' BARACK OBAMA
It is 1964 and Maya Angelou is on her way back home, leaving behind her beloved - and now seriously teenage son Guy, to finish university in Ghana. America is pulsing with the challenge of change, the civil rights movement is in full swing and that's where Maya Angelou wants to be, working alongside her friends Malcolm X and Martin Luther King.
In this marvellous account, Maya Angelou provides, with her customary wisdom, compassion and wit, a first-hand record of an extraordinarily exciting and tragic political period. She writes of Jimmy Baldwin, Eldridge Cleaver, and of friends and family, and finishes with the beginnings of her career as one of America's most impressive memoir writers.
'She moved through the world with unshakeable calm, confidence and a fierce grace . . . She will always be the rainbow in my clouds' OPRAH WINFREY
'She was important in so many ways. She launched African American women writing in the United States. She was generous to a fault. She had nineteen talents - used ten. And was a real original. There is no duplicate' TONI MORRISON
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Angelou left Ghana in 1964 to join Malcolm X in building the Organization of African-American Unity, and, in 1968, prepared to leave New York City to work with Martin Luther King Jr. Two calamitous events the assassinations of both frame this brief memoir, a sort of coda to Angelou's monumental serial autobiographies. The ghost of one leader and the foreshadowing of the death of the other lend depth to wanderings that in other hands would be mere meanderings. The four-year period she writes about here is filled with information about which readers might care little but the mere fact that it's written by this icon makes it important. At times, the name-dropping overwhelms ("Abbey Lincoln and Max Roach had moved from Columbus Avenue to Central Park West."), but her gracious spirit prevails. For those unfamiliar with it, Angelou's own story is deftly sketched. She recollects her attachment to her family mother, brother, son and her detachment from her husband with fondness and wryness, and briefly spotlights her various jobs, from polling housewives in Watts, Calif., to nightclub singing in Hawaii. Though satisfying, this sometimes flat account lacks the spiritual tone of Angelou's essays, the openness of her poetry and the drama of her other autobiographies. Soon after her return to the U.S. in the late 1960s, Angelou found herself with "no room in which I could consider my present and my past." This period of her life ended as Angelou embarked on her classic I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings; the rest is literary history.