Book review workshop piece

Finished a two-part workshop on how to write a book review yesterday. Here’s the result-just a first draft. The other workshop participants thought it was a bit too long, more like a literary analysis. I know many of the sentences are interminable and need a re-work. I’ll be taking it to writing group for some feedback tomorrow evening. What do you think? Please read and comment. Thanks.

—MrW

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Wouldn’t Take Nothing for My Journey Now

Maya Angelou

Published 1993 by Random House

Maya Angelou dedicates this slim, yet overflowing, volume of anecdote and essay, with a couple of poems wedged in, to Oprah Winfrey. That alone should tell you much about the book. This reflective collection of vignettes, none more than a few pages long, the shortest just a paragraph, reads like a diary, except we are invited to read it. Angelou takes us along to meet her mother and her grandmother, as well as a few male friends. She lets you tag along on her adventure, shares personal parts of her life. She opens her heart and bids us walk in. Even when tender or vulnerable, Maya Angelou exudes power, and she writes to share that power with us.

Perhaps best known for her first memoir, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Angelou is also an actor, director, producer, and writer for TV, film, and the stage. She is the author of several other books and collections of poetry. Only such an iconic figure can dispense wisdom and recount her life’s lessons in the poetic voice of wonder and realization, with the authority that Maya Angelou has earned as one of the world’s foremost lady of letters.

Some might expect deep philosophical musings from such a woman. Others might expect activist, perhaps even liberal, dissertations. In this book Angelou writes conservatively about basic, every day, human matters. She speaks out on speech, dress, manners, love, jealousy, faith, life and death succinctly, yet fully. She does not mince words, but is ever gracious. Sometimes her gems are dispensed directly. Her truths are best revealed, however, in her stories of the strong women who shaped her young life. Tales of her giant of a grandmother (6 feet 3 inches in stature), as well as her mother and a favorite aunt, all women who “… practiced stepping off the expected road and cutting herself a brand new path any time the desire arose,” are the best parts of the book. Angelou channels the wisdom of these women to us with her well-honed storytelling talents.

Males are not entirely absent, but are characterized only sparingly. We meet Mr. Johnson, who agrees with his wife that the marriage isn’t working out, then takes the money and runs, away from Arkansas to Oklahoma to study religion with a preacher he knows there (who just also happens to be the father of an attractive young girl). Annie Johnson (notice, she gives us just the wife’s first name) does not wallow in shame or despair. She starts selling fresh, hot meat pies to the men at two local factories, an endeavor which eventually grows into a general store. The other prominent man in the book is a teacher who makes a young, agnostic Maya read from a book a passage that ends with the words “God loves me,” repeatedly, until the impact makes her “… cry at the grandness of it all.” A few other men are presented briefly, and not always in a flattering light. Maya’s men, at least in this book, seem merely to be ambivalent catalysts, removed from the female experience. Often, one feels that the author’s criticisms are directed at men more than women. In Maya’s world, men are present only to drive the women to improve their lot through their own special and unique power. Males create problems; females solve them. However, she clearly does not hate men. This is best illustrated in the book by a stanza from Mrs. V. B., a poem inspired by her mother:

Men?

Yes I’ll love them.

If they’ve got style,

To make me smile

I’ll love them.

Wouldn’t Take Nothing…is both memoir and a bit of a self-help book. It may remind some readers of religious or inspirational tracts one might turn to daily for affirmation of faith and hope. At first glance it appears targeted specifically toward religious black women. The dedication, acknowledgements, and ad copy enforce this perception. One can’t blame the publisher for smart marketing. Thankfully, Angelou reminds us in the other of the book’s two poems that, “I note the obvious differences/between each sort and type,/but we are more alike, my friends,/than we are unalike.” She drives that truth home by repeating that final phrase thrice in succession, telling us that the truth is always worth repeating.

Angelou writes her truths, no holds barred. Still she manages to never wantonly criticize or preach down to her readers. Never coming off as superior, the author’s direct, honest, authoritative voice, rendered in her polished prose and poetry, reads like a packet of letters from a wise old aunt. God, religion, and feminism are ever present, filtered through her own contemplations and the stories of her powerful, resilient black matrons. This book nevertheless appealed to my godless, secular, white male self. As obviously Christian as Maya Angelou is, she lacks no concern for her non-Christian friends. She is all inclusive as she promotes the power of people, singly and together. She believes in the powers of the spirit and word of God, but people’s choices and actions, not necessarily God’s, have the greatest, most direct, and immediate influence and impact. If it is possible to be both religious and humanist, Angelou does so with finesse.

Wouldn’t Take Nothing… is predominantly prose, but Angelou’s poetic proclivities are everywhere within. Contemplating God’s love for her, she writes, “I am a big bird winging over high mountains, down into serene valleys. I am ripples of waves on silver seas. I’m a spring leaf trembling in anticipation.” Other subjects Angelou addresses in this book include racism (“…the plague of racism is insidious…”), complainers (“What you’re supposed to do when you don’t like a thing is change it,” her “Mamma” told her.), virtue (“…no longer considered a virtue.”), and contemporary comedians (What’s So Funny?). She also briefly offers her words concerning charity, child-bearing, child rearing, respect, romance, and travel.

All of Maya Angelou’s advice or admonishment is given in love for the adventure of life and all of Earth’s inhabitants. One gets the genuine feeling that she wants us all to know we can decide the route and direction of our journey. She wants us to experience everything the world throws at us with peace, power, passion, style and grace. She reminds us to make our life choices daring and challenging, but to choose carefully because, “…a price will be exacted from us for everything we do or leave undone.” That is a truth worth realizing not only philosophically, but practically. I thank Maya Angelou for reminding me of that, and the many other truths she shares from her seemingly bottomless well of wisdom, her profound pond of personal experience, found within Wouldn’t Take Nothing for My Journey Now, and, indeed, comprises the singular quality of all her works.