letter to my daughter maya angelou review

He is one of the founders of the Education Commission of the States (Grady, 2008). Among the books he wrote were: The American High School Today (1959), Slums and Suburbs (1961), The Education of American Teachers (1963), and The Comprehensive High School (1967). The title is apropos in that Conant's career was as a professor of organic chemistry and physics, president of Harvard University from 1933 to 1953, chief civilian administrator of American nuclear research, participant in the Manhattan project, participant in the decision on the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs, U.S Ambassador to Germany, and education reform advocate and author. Here is my offering to you.In preparing an essay on James Bryant Conant, I was struck by the title of his autobiography, My Several Lives: Memoirs of a Social Inventor (1970). You are fat and thin and pretty and plain, gay and straight, educated and unlettered, and I am speaking to you all.

You are Black and White, Jewish and Muslim, Asian, Spanish speaking, Native Americans and Aleut. “I gave birth to one child, a son, but I have thousands of daughters. Like the rest of her remarkable work, Letter to My Daughter entertains and teaches it is a book to cherish, savor, re-read, and share. Whether she is recalling such lost friends as Coretta Scott King and Ossie Davis, extolling honesty, decrying vulgarity, explaining why becoming a Christian is a “lifelong endeavor,” or simply singing the praises of a meal of red rice–Maya Angelou writes from the heart to millions of women she considers her extended family. Here in short spellbinding essays are glimpses of the tumultuous life that led Angelou to an exalted place in American letters and taught her lessons in compassion and fortitude: how she was brought up by her indomitable grandmother in segregated Arkansas, taken in at thirteen by her more worldly and less religious mother, and grew to be an awkward, six-foot-tall teenager whose first experience of loveless sex paradoxically left her with her greatest gift, a son. Maya Angelou shares her path to living well and with meaning in this absorbing book of personal essays.ĭedicated to the daughter she never had but sees all around her, Letter to My Daughter transcends genres and categories: guidebook, memoir, poetry, and pure delight.

Letter to my daughter maya angelou review