A Song Flung Up to Heaven by Maya Angelou -Carson

A Song Flung Up to Heaven

 A Song Flung Up to Heaven by Maya Angelou is an account of her life after she returns to the United States from Africa to be a civil rights activist. Miss Angelou is a poet, teacher, singer, performer, director and has written 7 autobiographies about her life as a black women during the civil rights movement. The book opens with a letter from Malcolm X asking Angelou to come work with him in New York. Of course she accepts his offer but first she must travel to California to reunite with her mother and brother. While visiting with her beloved brother, the only person she would talk to after being raped by her mother's boyfriend, she received news that Malcolm X had been assassinated. Angelou, devastated, slowly puts her life back together with odd singing jobs in local bars, and multiple on-stage theatre production. While conducting a door-to-door survey in Watts, the town explodes in riots, an account she describes first-hand. The energy from the riot excites her and so she returns to New York in hopes of finding an editorial job. While at a party, a close friends of hers, Martin Luther King Jr. approaches her and nearly begs her to be his coordinator in the north and visit all the black churches to spread the word about his Poor People's March. A dream come true for Miss Angelou. However, tragedy strikes again when Martin Luther King Jr. is assassinated. Angelou falls deep into a depression in which she will not speak or leave her apartment. The depression only lasts about four pages when one of her best friends, James Baldwin, forces her to attend a dinner party. At the dinner party she laughs and cries and tells stories of her life in Ghana. Because of the detail and authenticity of Miss Angelou's stories, she is offered a job as the host and writer of a talk show comparing the African culture to the African-American culture. It is while writing this show that she decides to try writing her first autobiography, I Know Why the Caged Birds Sing. Maya Angelou not only shares her passion for music but she describes the heartbreak of leaving her 18 year old trouble-making son behind in Ghana. She describes her husband and his seductive yet overbearing ways. She even describes the hardships of writing as a black women. Miss Angelou fights through the civil rights movement all while keeping the reader entertained with silly pieces of advice from her mother, playful sibling arguments and phone calls from her son asking for more money for another crazy adventure he has planned. Chapter by chapter Angelou weaves a beautifully written story out of many stories from her life. With dialogue in every scene, A Song Flung Up to Heaven reads much like a fiction novel. Maya Angelou records her difficult destiny with style and grace in a moving story of her intelligence and wit. An easy read for anyone who wants to walk alongside a great woman during the civil rights movement.