Product Description

Maya Angelou's five volumes of autobiography are a testament to the talents and resilience of this extraordinary writer. Loving the world, she also knows its cruelty. As a black woman she has known discrimination and extreme poverty, but also hope, joy, achievement and celebration. In the fifth volume, Maya Angelou emigrates to Ghana only to discover that 'you can't go home again' but she comes to a new awareness of love and friendship, civil rights and slavery - and the myth of mother Africa

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #171589 in Books
• Published on: 1993-09-02
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 224 pages

Review
'She continues with all the freshness and warmth of her earlier books' EVENING STANDARD 'Maya Angelou has an amazing ability to take readers into her personal maze and lead them out again feeling refreshed and even jubilant' CLANCY SIGAL, GUARDIAN 'Maya Angelou has a fiercely uncompromising spirit' DAILY TELEGRAPH 'Told with the humorous, unsentimental wisdom that has gained Maya Angelou such a devoted following' SUNDAY TIMES

About the Author
Maya Angelou has been waitress, singer, actress, dancer, activist, filmmaker, writer and mother. As well as her autobiography she has written several volumes of poetry and has a life-time appointment as Reynolds Professor of American Studies at Wake Forest University in North Carolina.

Customer Reviews

A wonderful end to an exhilarating journey
This book is the last in a series of 5 that has taken Maya Angelou from being a young kid in the South to a mature woman and mother living out her dreams in Africa. Maya's story combines so many elements of a good book- it has excitement, it touches history, it is philosophical, emotional - yet it is all true. One wonders as she comes into contact with the great figures of African and African American life, and as she contemplates the place of an African-American in the African dream, as well as the place of the Africa in the American dream.

Behind all of the great moments that do not happen in the lives of most people this story is ultimately human. She battles for the development of her son and herself as a woman, mother. She reaches a place of greater maturity and yet with these new skills with which to understand the world around her, comes the insecurities both trivial and profound, that she articulates in a manner that that brings the reader to empathise greatly as if Maya is holding up a mirror for the reader, to understand themselves with great warmth and courage.

The end of the other titles in the series were frustrating but this could be assuaged by the reading of the next, this last one leaves you satisfied by the experience, but bursting for more - surely the sign of a successful story and a great read

Pointless and empty
I found this book such a waste of time.The first half was simply a list of black activists that Maya met in Ghana with very few worthwhile anecdotes.There was hardly any sense of the real Ghana at that time, just Maya patting herself on the back time after time simply for having mixed with some fellow American black activists.They seemed to make scant contribution to anything but Maya admired their rudeness, hostility and sarcasm.
What a disappointment the Malcolm X episode turned out to be; just a list of people he visited. Political rant over substance.

Funny bits
This book is about Maya Angelou emigrating to Ghana with her son.

There are some funny bits that I can relate to being from an african family. It was well written but the passages were abit slow.