I guess I haven't really read Maya Angelou before so I may not have acquired the taste for her writing and the requisite knowledge of the form to understand this book. I often feel this way upon encountering poetry (adult contemporary poetry--I can handle Ogden Nash and Shel Silverstein and a variety of poems we had to memorize in high school English). Though this book is mostly prose, the stylization of the prose is not my favorite (or perhaps I should say it is not in my comfort zone). The book is bite sized so I read it quickly once I started, but by the end I didn't and still don't know what to think of what I read. I didn't like it, though I am willing to be persuaded that I should have.

The book is really a series of 2-3 page writings that are each to greater or lesser extent independent from each other. The first few seemed to progress in time and together tell a story of Angelou's life. At the outset I thought I would like it because it seemed to consist of bits of empowering wisdom passed on from Angelou's life experiences. These short anecdotes I enjoyed. However, as the book progressed, the bits got less focused and I became less interested in continuing to read it. The stories or bits felt oddly disjointed and increasingly random. Then there were greater jumps in time and place and individual writings started mid-thought.
My tolerance for the book finally ended with a writing about violence in politics, "National Spirit." The piece was trope, exactly what a politician would say, meaningless nothing about how we all should be better.
I read on past this but skimmed and skipped and didn't put in much effort.