Even the Stars Look Lonesome

by Maya Angelou

Book Overview

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER - "Maya Angelou writes like a song, and like the truth."--The New York Times Book Review "Everything about Maya Angelou is transcendental. She has something to tell you now.... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0375500316
• ISBN13: 9780375500312
• Release Date: August 1997
• Publisher: Random House
• Length: 145 Pages
• Weight: 0.71 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.7" x 8.2"

Customer Reviews

Read this!

it talks about essays of aspects in life and what kind of journey that people are planning to have in their experiences and I think its a very interesting bookBest Book

the spoken truth

maya angelou's even the stars look lonesome is an outburst to the african american society. it gives so much hope. her words express a lyrical emotion. her usage of intelligent voice structure titilates the mind.

Maya Angelou's Voice Is One To Be Embraced

When Maya Angelou was a young woman -- "in the crisp days of my youth," she says -- she carried with her a secret conviction that she wouldn't live past the age of 28. Raped by her mother's boyfriend at 8 and a mother herself since she graduated from high school, she supported herself and her son, Guy, through a series of careers and buoyed by an implacable ambition to escape what might have been a half-lived, ground-down life of poverty and despair. "For it is hateful to be young, bright, ambitious and poor," Angelou observes. "The added insult is to be aware of one's poverty." In "Even the Stars Look Lonesome," a collection of reflective autobiographical essays, Angelou gives no further explanation for her "profound belief" that she would die young. "I was thirty-six before I realized that I had lived years beyond my deadline and needed to revise my thinking about an early death," she recalls. "With that realization life waxed sweeter. Old acquaintances became friendships, and new clever acquaintances showed themselves more interesting. Old loves burdened with memories of disappointments and betrayals packed up and left town, leaving no forwarding address, and new loves came calling."Angelou, looking at tailights of her 20's, is the nearest thing America has to a sacred institution, a high priestess of culture and love in the tradition of such distaff luminaries (all of them, hitherto, white) as Isadora Duncan and Pearl S. Buck, with a bit of Eleanor Roosevelt and Aimée Semple MacPherson thrown into the mix. "She was born poor and powerless in a land where/power is money and money is adored," the poet Angelou writes in tribute to another astonishing black woman of our time, Oprah Winfrey. "Born black in a land where might is white/and white is adored./Born female in a land where decisions are masculine/and masculinity controls." Angelou's lifelong effort to escape and expose the "national, racial and historical hallucinations" that have burdened black women in America and replace them with a shining exemplar of power, achievement and generosity of spirit is as miraculous as she says it is, even if one suspects that in "real life" Angelou must be a little hard to take. "I would have my ears filled with the world's music," she writes, "the grunts of hewers of wood, the cackle of old folks sitting in the last sunlight and the whir of busy bees in the early morning ... All sounds of life and living, death and dying are welcome to my ears." At times Angelou seems more like a blast from Olympus than a woman of flesh and blood.Reading these essays, I found myself longing somewhat guiltily for evidence of smallness on her part, of pettiness, even -- some sign that even an icon as monumental as she is might occasionally allow herself an irritated moment, a lapse into cynicism, or humor that wasn't so resolutely seasoned and wise. On the other hand, smallness isn't what Maya Angelou stands for. Ordinary is not what she does. Only a cynic, a smaller mind

Awesome

What a Voice! What an inspiration, and great enunciation. The Lady is her usual awesome self in this wise and eloquent sharing of some of her more intimate life experiences. It's impossible to adequately praise Angelou's ability to speak to the heart and soul, whether through her written work or recorded truth. You'll listen to this over and over again, and will be renewed, and renewed. Enjoy!

Insightful!

Maya Angelou provides insight and humour in her book Even the Stars Look Lonesome. The book is a quick read but deservedly warrants several readings.The prose is simple , yet profound coming from a woman who has lived through life's joys and sorrows. The book is rather poetic; at times, it appears as though one were reading her poetry and not prose. Even the Stars Look Lonesome is a book for all to cherish; she provides insight on the joy of aging, commends Oprah Winfrey on her strengths, talks about events in her life that shaped her and people that influenced her. Overall, a joy to read; a book that entertains, educates and makes life a more pleasant journey.