All God's Children Need Traveling Shoes by Maya Angelou (1991) ( )

Ghana, family, travel

Maya Angelou has 6 volumes of her autobiography books out and this is #5.
All God's Children Need Travelling Shoes is a very well written piece, as are all of her works. It is informative, colorful, interesting, full of bigger than life characters and small events that color the book and seem large.
She wrote this volume about her time in Ghana, when she "wanted to go home" to Africa. It is rich in detail, rich in friendships, and I love her descriptive phrasing in this book.
She took her 17 year old son and moved to Ghana planning to stay. It didn't turn out that way but the story of her stay there is very interesting and I enjoyed this work of hers very much. It helped me to understand the woman she has become. However, I would probably only recommend it to loyal fans of Angelou. ( )

Refreshing piece of personal history from the times of Pan-African movement and her period of living in African continent in the 1960s (mostly in Ghana). Most is told through her own feelings and personal (parental and social) experiences as black American on Africa, but theres brief apperances of certain historical figures like Malcolm X and Liberian president. Most telling description also from her theatrical travel to Berlin, in telling about the meeting around dinner table between a German (host), a jew and (herself) black afro-american. Each one tells a symbolical story to others, and what a stories these are...for the interesting use her english words the my overall points given would be even more than 3.5, but the depictoring of events itself is sometimes little incoherent. ( )

The best part of this book is the title. Needless to say, I was not impressed with the book itself. I found it disjointed and un-eventful. I feel bad saying this as this is suppossed to be part of an amazing, ground breaking autobiography- and I can see how it could be... I just didn't feel it. I'm not familiar with the majority of situations described in the book, and instead of Angelou explaining it to me, she just left it as is and I became even more confused. Then, to make it even more frustrating, she isn't a very likable character- I actually found her annoying! And all I want to know is why she doesn't eat fish! I feel bad I didn't like the book... I really wanted to!

FAVORITE QUOTES: The Ache for home lives in all of us, the safe place where we can go as we are and not be questioned. ( )