I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
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Book Reviews of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
Book Review: A Review of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
Summary: 5 Stars
Albert Ellis once said, "The art of love...is largely persistence" and in I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by critically acclaimed Maya Angelou, persistence is exactly what young Maya intends to keep strong. The completely autobiographical memoir lures the reader in with its depiction of the lives of blacks in the Deep South during the Depression. Within the heart of rural Stamps, Arkansas little Maya and her brother Bailey are prisoners of the tight knit community and all that it brings. Along with their sacrilegious Grandmother, who is constantly in a fit in regards to any lack of obedience, Maya struggles to find her place. On the surface, she plays a character who genuinely enjoys living among her interesting quartet of a family, her Grandmother, her physically disabled Uncle Willie, and her true joy in life, Bailey are all she has in the world until her estranged father arrives to take Maya and Bailey to live with "Mother Dearest." The life of the big city entrances Maya and her imagination. While living with her mother, Maya receives an education, and meets all sorts of different people, one of those people being Mr. Freeman, Maya's mother's boyfriend. When Mr. Freeman takes advantage of eight year old Maya, it becomes clear that the children must be sent back home to their little town of Stamps.
For the rest of Maya's time in Stamps, she encounters all sorts of different types of people; people who will make a great impact in due time, and those who simply play a role in every day fun. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings portrays a great tale of a young girl's battle to suppress the boredom of country life and strive for a greater meaning to her existence while also dealing with the inevitable battles of growing up.
Maya Angelou's writing is flawless and each phrase is master crafted to perfection as she explores the truth of her childhood. "Looking through the years, I marvel that Saturday was my favorite day in the week. What pleasures could have been squeezed between the fanfolds of unending tasks? Children's talent to endure stems from their ignorance of alternatives." (113) The beauty of her words flow together in a magnificent mosaic of phrases and each step in this eloquent autobiography leaves a lingering sense of compassion in the reader's heart. The heart wrenching moments, though distressing, are overshadowed by the little joys Maya always seems to find. The way she confronts the temptations and urges throughout her teenage years are exposed in great detail as she takes little steps to achieve what she considers the "normality" of being a teenage girl.
I truly enjoyed this radiant and joyful story with its realistic balance of pain and pleasure. The reader will be forever mindful of this little girl's journey into adulthood, the quest for love, and the long standing clash with society.
Book Review: An adult review--and one teacher's viewpoint
Summary: 5 Stars
May I tell you why I choose to have my ninth grade students read it? I have noticed a lot of reviews by young people, which I applaud, but an adult perspective might be helpful. I don't particularly feel the need to defend its merits. (I am not articulate enough to do justice to that task.) As with any book, some will love it and some won't. Guaranteed, it will make you uncomfortable at times, because one chapter describes the rape of a young person--which is painful for any compassionate human being to hear. Plus, there are other sexual issues, largely stemming from the earlier assault, but also because she is a teenager in the last phase of the book. Such questions about love and sex are characteristic of the teenage years. Many young people, as well as adults, are confused about such topics. While these are generally the most controversial segments from the book, the fundamental lesson of the book goes far beyond the survival of one victim. I won't supply you with the answers as to what one should take away from the text. It is a personal experience for each of us.
We can all learn from Maya's honest account of her childhood journey. We can all try on her experiences and live vicariously through her for a while, and see how it changes our own perspective on what it means to be a human being.
I'll be the first to admit, this book is a challenge for all my students in one way or another. Some because they are white and live in the northern US. Some because they are male and it's difficult to view life through a woman's eyes. Some because of the adult vocabulary and extensive use of figurative language. Some of these experiences are so remote from their own, while others are very close to home. It helps them to see how much we actually do have in common with those who at first seem very different. They all can benefit from reading it, if they give it a chance. (Adults may be better equiped to appreciate fully this text. However, young people can take so much from it. Maybe one day, we can have an abridged version, so it is still rich in language and meaning, yet condensed so more young people can access its many gifts.)
Beyond the darkness of some of those experiences (discrimination, rape, humilation and fear) lies a powerful sense of hope, dignity, determination and resilience. One of my favorite aspects of the book is its emphasis on the power of education, language and literacy. Throughout Maya's life--books, poetry, impassioned voices have all inspired her. Her autobiography is a moving tribute to a literate way of life and an enduring legacy to that tradition.
Book Review: Caged Bird: From Fear to Freedom
Summary: 5 Stars
Maya Angelou was born into a society that was as rigidly stratified as any other in the world. Sometimes this stratification is based on religion, or on ethnic caste, or as in the United States, on skin color. What most often happens is that the favored color takes certain things for granted: upward mobility is within reach, respect is expected, and laws are meant for all (of that color). The subordinate color learns the inverse. In I KNOW WHY THE CAGED BIRD SINGS, Maya, as a child, learns all that plus she conspires against herself and her color. She sees whiteness as a desirable trait, blackness as not. In fact, her early life in Stamps is one prolonged immersion in what she terms a 'black ugly dream.' To compound her dilemma, she faces gender discrimination. Boys on the black pecking order occupy a rung higher. Yet despite all this, Maya even manages to overcome the trauma of rape at the age of eight from a trusted family friend. What Maya takes out of this act of violation is her realization that the ogre of life can be shut down if she learns to shut herself down. For months afterwards, she is deliberately mute. Her silence screams volumes while her soul decides how to heal itself. Eventually, Maya finds solace in the way that all trod on underdogs do: by self-betterment. With the help of her brother Bailey and god-fearing family, Maya discovers that the key to her rebirth lies first in books, then later in extracting nuggets of wisdom from those books which she can apply to her life. The careful reader will surely note that even the very young Maya is exceptionally erudite and glib. This is more a function of the adult Maya structuring her memories enriched with a lifetime of learning from those memories than it is of a precocious child. The grown woman Maya Angelou is a superb writer who uses the traditional devices of figurative language, a sense of the power of the spoken word, and a wide ranging use of symbols, all of which add up to a story that never palls or drags. By the time the reader gets to the end, this reader can see that the journey of a little girl who made the rounds of a short life of physical and emotional bounces has learned from a book what that girl so painfully endured: that freedom can only be achieved if fear is first confronted then beaten down.
Book Review: I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
Summary: 5 Stars
Bagna Braestrup 5/15/00 English 8W I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings My name is Bagna and I am currently in 8th grade. As an assignment for my English class I read I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, by Dr. Maya Angelou. While reading this book, I experienced a lot of different emotions such as happiness, sadness, and anger. It was hard to believe how horrible life was for the black people. Dr. Maya Angelou talked about all the terrible events that happened in her life and transfered her feelings into her writing. Many of them took courage to write about. While reading this book I was additionally reading To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings described the Blacks' perspective on life during that era. To Kill a Mockingbird was written from a white persons point of view. Because it was written from the point of view of a white man, the Blacks in the story do not seem individual, they were portrayed as a group seemed to possess the same traits. It was the contrary in I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. The lifestyles of the two races, were very different. The grammar each race used was dissimilar, the Whites being more educated. By contrasting the two books, I can see how the Whites and the Blacks lived in two different worlds, one of luxuries and the other of necessities. The diction Dr. Maya Angelou uses to describe the setting with is fitting to the story line. Her knowledge is shown in her style, by the way she writes so articulately. It shows her education compared to the schooling of the other Blacks. One sentence in the book genuinely shows this: "My relief melted the fears and they liquidly stole down my face." This sentence is describing her crying out of relief. The way in which she words it is truly beautiful. There were points in the book that were tiring because the author kept describing everyday events that were irrelevant to the story. Dr. Angelou talked about living in a town called Stamps longer than necessary. This book was very good. I would certainly recommend this book to a friend. The events are described in such a way that the reader can not put the book down. The author apparently is very scholarly, and can tell her story in a very admirable way.Book Review: Race, gender, childhood ...but mostly HOPE
Summary: 5 Stars
This is one beautiful memoir, standing tall above the multitudes which dwell on self-pity or obsessive self-interest. Angelou tells of her life in such a lyrical, affirming way that she speaks to the potential humanity in everybody. Her survival, despite tough challenges, is really about the survival of anybody who has had an inner self yearning to cry out, "I matter!"This book is about feeling and healing the emotional wounds of racism, to be sure. But it is also about transcending that pain, drawing from it deeper levels of meaning about being truly human and truly alive. Or, as Angelou recalls her mother saying abuot the perversity of life, "in the struggle lies the joy."
One enjoyable feature of this book is that many of the chapters "stand alone" as self-contained stories in their own right. There is a recollection of a night listening to Joe Louis squaring off with a white contender, with blacks feeling the hopes of their people alternatively sinking and rising with punches taken and punches delivered. In another chapter, Angelou vividly outlines a child's on-target perception of a religious revival as nothing more than a vehicle for adult retribution fantasies. Sometimes, chapters focus on simple yet eternal truths, like the one which tells of the insidioius pull which a ghost story can have on a child's imagination. Even so, the sum is greater than the total of the parts, as each recollection somehow moves the ongoing journey of self-discovery along.
Angelou also abounds with delightful metaphors, introducing such expressions as "harmony packed tight as sardines," and giggles that "hung in the air like melting clouds." Anyone who simply enjoys the creative ways in which words can take us back to the unvarnished center of human experience will find much to admire here.
Having read this first installment of a multi-part autobiography, the reader will look forward to reading the subsequent works. Angelou is telling her story in the best way possible -- how she liberated that part of her self that speaks and breathes and lives for ALL of us. What a great poet she is! May her words continue to inspire and affirm for a long, long time.