A Song Flung Up to Heaven

It is 1964 and Maya Angelou is on her way back home, leaving behind her beloved - and now seriously teenage - son Guy, to finish university in Ghana. America is pulsing with the challenge of change, the civil rights movement is in full swing and that's where Maya Angelou wants to be, working alongside her friends Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr.In this marvellous account, Maya Angelou provides, with her customary wisdom, compassion and wit, a first-hand record of an extraordinarily exciting and tragic political period. She writes of 'Jimmy' Baldwin, Eldridge Cleaver, and of friends and family, and finishes with the beginnings of her career as one of America's most impressive memoir writers.'She has the knack of guiding us along the seamier side of life while making us feel refreshed and restored like a terrific gospel blues singer' GUARDIAN'Told with the humorous, unsentimental wisdom that has gained her such a devoted following' SUNDAY TIMES'Triumphantly completes the six volumes of autobiography that began nearly thirty years ago with Maya Angelou's astonishingly successful I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings - a work that changed readers' perceptions of what autobiographical writing could achieve' BARRY FORSHAW