A Song Flung Up to Heaven
On sale
2nd September 2010
Price: £10.99
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
‘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
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Reviews
Told with the humorous, unsentimental wisdom that has gained her such a devoted following
She has the knack of guiding us along the seamier side of life while making us feel refreshed and restored like a terrific gospel blues singer
Angelou conveys a sense of the period, complete with the pulsating rhythms of local slang, while her own elegantly gentle view provides the bigger perspective . . . Angelou has lived a life that deserves writing about, and only she can make that story sing with life
The poems and stories she wrote . . . were gifts of wisdom and wit, courage and grace
It's been a long time coming, but A Song Flung Up To Heaven triumphantly completes the six volumes of autobiography that began nearly thirty years ago with Maya Angelou's astonishingly successful I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings - a work that changed readers' perceptions of what autobiographical writing could achieve
It delivers the same essential charge of uplifting warmth, clear-eyed sagacity and indefatigable generosity of spirit, leaving us only to hope that another series, covering the latter portion of the roller-coaster's progress, might be in the offering
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
She moved through the world with unshakeable calm, confidence and a fierce grace . . . She will always be the rainbow in my clouds
A brilliant writer, a fierce friend and a truly phenomenal woman