Title
READ // Singin' and Swingin' and Getting' Merry Like Christmas
Recommended Title
Singin’ and Swingin’ and Gettin’ Merry Like Christmas
By Maya Angelou
New York : Bantam Books, c1977, c1976
PS3551.N464Z475 1977
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Comments
From Former Assistant Dean Carol Cochran:
From the moment I first read a Maya Angelou book I knew I had to read more. There are several books in which she writes about her life but this one, Singin’ and Swingin’ and Getting’ Merry like Christmas captured my imagination more than any other. Maya Angelou has had such an incredible life and this book discussing her life as an artist, wife and mother, again shows how she has become such a national treasure and an important role model for women of all color and backgrounds.
Like Ms. Angelou, I too thought when I was older I would travel the world performing as an artist. I think the most eye opening part of the book came when she talks about her time traveling the world as a member of the touring group of Porgy and Bess in the late 1950s. At one point she teaches herself Serbo-Croatian and wanders the city meeting and speaking to the locals. For many it was the first time they had seen an African American, let alone one who was speaking their own language! Maya Angelou never let convention define her, and I hope I never will either.
This book also has special meaning to me as my copy is from a friend who is no longer with us. Thanks Deena for sharing.
From the Publisher:
[In this book] Maya Angelou, dazzling entertainer, casts the spotlight on her show business career -- a pageant of international scope. Maya, the woman, shares her sad, failed marriage to a white man, her early motherhood and achingly sensitive relationship with her young son, and her bone-deep, painful suspicion of the white world that welcomes her talent so dramatically...
About the Author:
Maya Angelou was born in 1928. A native Arkansan, her autobiographical books chronicle her varied, often harsh experience of being raped at seven, of bearing a child at sixteen, and of her work-as an actress, as a school administrator in Africa, and as a poet. She celebrates in the black experience the capacity not merely to survive but to grow and to triumph over adversity as well. The same theme is echoed in her poetry.