I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou

I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou is another book I wouldn't have been allowed to bring into my home when it was first published. My parents would have considered it a book written by a "trouble maker". Over the years, I heard many good things about it and even read an exerpt from it (the story about little Maya visiting the dentist with her grandmother) and I always wanted to get around to reading it. Now I have.

I've read a lot of books that have given me goose bumps because of the depth of man's inhumanity to fellow beins--most recently, Schindler's List. This was such a book too. Ms. Angelou wrote about her growing up years from the time she & her brother were sent to Arkansas to live with her grandmother (she was 3) until she was a teenager and living in California with her mother again. Racism is scary in the south but it's still pervasive and ugly in California, circa 1940. Some of the memories recounted made me sick.

There were some strong, positive figures here--the grandmother (Mama) and brother Bailey. There were others that just gave me the creepiest creeps, like Maya's mother's boyfriend and that horrid white dentist.

I was all ready to talk about all the examples of racism but then I realized there might be people out there who, like me, haven't read the book yet so I decided against it. This book definitely should be in the classics category (and it is) and I really don't get why it was banned from any library. I know the reason provided but it's ridiculous--my opinion. It's a great book.

Reading this book fit these challenges:

Mixology

New Authors

For the last two challenges, I don't get why I can't copy the links and pictures. I keep putting the html in my side bar and every time I go back to copy it, I only get the pictures, not the html. I'm not going to keep going back to those pages just to get the same information time and again so I give up. I'll just list the two challenges by name.