I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (Maya Angelou's Autobiography, #1) in Around the World in 80 Books

Apr 15, 2024 Linda Martin rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: memoirs, 2024, geo-california, christian, families, nonfiction, geo-arkansas, geo-missouri, child-welfare

This is an honest, self-actualizing, fascinating memoir of Maya Angelou's childhood and teen years. I'm very positively impressed by her in so many ways, after reading this. Where do I begin?

She starts the book by telling us her father sent her with her brother on a railway journey without adult supervision, during preschool years as I recall it, from California to Arkansas. By great good fortune they arrived with tags on them in Stamps, Arkansas where her father's mother raised them for years a ...more

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Mar 02, 2013 Lindsey Z rated it really liked it

There is little more heartbreaking than when Angelou describes being molested by her mother's boyfriend while staying with her in St. Louis. Angelou's working through of establishing self-worth in her early years is one of the most poignant in African-American autobiography. It's interesting that she talked so much about her silent spell after the rape in a live talk I saw last year, but doesn't linger on it in her autobiography. I was expecting more of it to come through; perhaps her reflection ...more

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Mar 19, 2022 Annie rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

I listened to the audiobook of I KNOW WHY THE CAGED BIRD SINGS, narrated by Maya Angelou herself, and I thought it was spectacular. She had me spellbound from beginning to the end. It’s a dramatic story of her childhood and youth in small town Arkansas and city life in California told simply with humor, warmth and dignity. Heartbreaking moments of overt racism, sexual assault, and abandonment are pared down to sparse, shining prose by a master wordsmith. Angelou’s words feel just as poignant and ...more

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Oct 07, 2020 Traci rated it really liked it

Well written memoir that reads like a novel. Just an amazing story. I didn't know much about Maya Angelou before reading this book. What an amazing rise above a heartbreaking childhood. Angelou does an amazing job describing the childhood of a black woman raised in the South in the 30s and 40s. She depicts it accurately without accusations. I feel this has a much bigger impact that drawing too much hatred into the work. I will read more of her memoirs to learn more about this woman's life. ...more

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