20 of 21 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Maya Angelou's Voice Is One To Be Embraced, December 13, 2000
By A Customer
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 than Angelou's, could fail to welcome the gifts she offers.
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14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Life's little lessons and stories., May 5, 1999
By A Customer
"Even The Stars Look Lonesome", by Maya Angelou is a collection of short insights into things that are important to her. It is the second book in a sequence following "Wouldn't Take Nothing For My Journey Now." Maya Angelou touches down on various subjects like how a house can hurt those who live there but a home can heal it's occupants. She also reveals her knowledge to the reader on sensuality and how everyone has the right to sexuality. My favorite one is her essay on how her thoughts of growing old have changed since she has become old. In her book she shows the downside of having pride in her fame and she also tells of the unforgetable lessons she has learned of violence and anger. There is also a short profile of Oprah and other stories fo being an African-American. "Even The Stars Look Lonesome" is Maya Angelou's book of things that she believes must be learned throught one's lifetime.
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8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Awesome, December 16, 1999
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!
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