A wonderfully written and insightful autobiography about a part of Angelou's life. Her spirit shines through and serves as a model to all who become acquainted with her.

This is one of my all time favorites. It was a required reading in Jr. High and it affected me emotionally then. Now, as an adult at 47, I purchased it to read again. I still feel the emotional roller coaster over the hard and cruel life that Maya (Marguerite) faced as a child. But she managed to survive and master her emotions to become a strong independent woman very early in life. By sharing her life story she has become a shining beacon for others, to show no matter how down-trodden, hopeless, alone or abandoned you may feel, if you dig deep within yourself you have the power to endure, persevere, and overcome. She is an outstanding icon to women everywhere.

Maya Angelou recounts a youth filled with disappointment, frustration, tragedy, and finally hard-won independence. Sent at a young age to live with her grandmother in Arkansas, Angelou learned a great deal from this exceptional woman and the tightly knit black community there. These very lessons carried her throughout the hardships she endured later in life, including a tragic occurrence while visiting her mother in St. Louis and her formative years spent in California--where an unwanted pregnancy changed her life forever. Marvelously told, with Angelou's "gift for language and observation," this "remarkable autobiography by an equally remarkable black woman from Arkansas captures, indelibly, a world of which most Americans are shamefully ignorant."

First of Angelou's autobiographies, covering her childhood split between the rural home of her grandmother in Arkansas and the California big-city home of her mother. Angelou writes unsparingly of her childhood sexual assault and her adolescent doubts about her own sexuality. But the most luminous sections of the book deal with her reminiscences of the interconnected web of the black community at her grandmother's home, particularly their strong religious beliefs.

This dear, warm, intelligent woman has touched the soul and shattered the hearts of so many of us. I'm just glad that I'm on the planet in the same time span she is. The world is a far better place for having Ms. Maya in it.

This is one of my favorite books of all time.

a wonderfully written story about Angelou's life.

I did not like Maya Angelou's book. I thought it was a little too graphic.

I have read and taught this book many times. Other than some possilby questionable material (in term of students' age-appropriateness) I would highly recommend this book.

An excellent book by Maya Angelou. Very thought provoking and touching.

i love her wrirting style, wonderfull book

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Great read! The story moves swiftly through the author's life from age 5 or 6 through age 16, from Arkansas to St. Louis to California to Mexico. This is not only a tremendously entertaining story, but Angelou's writing lends a poetry to her life that makes the terrible things somehow okay, and the good things even better. A stunning portrait of a young southern black girl's place in not only the south, but the greater world beyond it, and a VERY worthwhile read.

personal account of Angelou's youth

Great book! I could read it over and over again.

like new!

Book is a 1971 printing. Please do not expect a recent printing.

Touchingly told touching life.

"This testimony from a Black sister marks the beginning of a new ear in the minds and hearts and lives of all Black Men and Women..."

this testimony from a black author marks the beginning of a new era in the minds and hearts and lives of all Black men and women

"Simultaneously touching and comic."
-NY Times

didn't read it

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