letter to my daughter maya angelou review

I almost feel like I have a personal relationship with her, like she’s my soul sister or surrogate grandmother. She died in 2014.After recently reading Maya Angelou’s Hallelujah! The Welcome Table, I had a hankering for more of her. Angelou was honored with the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2010 by President Barack Obama. She published seven autobiographies, three books of essays, several books of poetry, and is credited with a list of plays, movies, and television shows spanning over 50 years.Īngelou rose to prominence with the publication of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings in 1969. Maya Angelou was an American memoirist, popular poet, and civil rights activist raised in Stamps, Arkansas. Here is my offering to you.”-from Letter to My Daughter You are fat and thin and pretty and plain, gay and straight, educated and unlettered, and I am speaking to you all.

You are Black and White, Jewish and Muslim, Asian, Spanish speaking, Native Americans and Aleut. “I gave birth to one child, a son, but I have thousands of daughters.

Like the rest of her remarkable work, Letter to My Daughter entertains and teaches it is a book to cherish, savor, re-read, and share. Whether she is recalling such lost friends as Coretta Scott King and Ossie Davis, extolling honesty, decrying vulgarity, explaining why becoming a Christian is a “lifelong endeavor,” or simply singing the praises of a meal of red rice–Maya Angelou writes from the heart to millions of women she considers her extended family. Here in short spellbinding essays are glimpses of the tumultuous life that led Angelou to an exalted place in American letters and taught her lessons in compassion and fortitude: how she was brought up by her indomitable grandmother in segregated Arkansas, taken in at thirteen by her more worldly and less religious mother, and grew to be an awkward, six-foot-tall teenager whose first experience of loveless sex paradoxically left her with her greatest gift, a son. Maya Angelou shares her path to living well and with meaning in this absorbing book of personal essays.ĭedicated to the daughter she never had but sees all around her, Letter to My Daughter transcends genres and categories: guidebook, memoir, poetry, and pure delight.

Letter to my daughter maya angelou review