Books with title The Heart Of A Warrior

In The Heart of a Woman Maya Angelou leaves California with her son, Guy, to go to New York. There she enters the society and world of black artists and writers. Not since her childhood has she lived in an almost black environment, and she is surprised at the obsession her new friends have with the white world around them. She stays for a while with John and Grace Killens and begins to read her writing at the Harlem Writers Guild. She continues to sing, most notably at the Apollo Theatre in Harlem, but more and more she begins to take part in the struggle of black Americans for their rightful place in the world. She helps organize a benefit cabaret for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and then is appointed Martin Luther Kings Northern Coordinator.Shortly after that, through her friend Abbey Lincoln, she takes one of the lead parts in Genet's The Blacks (it was a remarkable cast, including Godfrey Cambridge, Roscoe Lee Brown, James Earl Jones, Cicely Tyson, Raymond St. Jacques, and Lou Gossett), and even writes music for the production.In the meantime her personal life has taken a tempestuous turn. She has left the New York bail bondsman she was intending to marry and has fallen in love with a South African freedom fighter named Vusumzi Make, who sweeps her off her feet and eventually takes her to London and then to Cairo, where, as her marriage begins to break up, she becomes the first female editor of the English-language magazine.The Heart of a Woman is filled with unforgettable vignettes of famous people, from Billie Holiday to Malcolm X, but perhaps most important is the story of Maya Angelou's relationship with her son. Because this book chronicles, finally, the joys and the burdens of a black mother in America and how the son she had cherished so intensely and worked for so devotedly finally grows to be a man.

A powerful coming of age story set in beautiful Kenya, Africa, about a young Maasai warrior who confronts what it means to be a man. Young Soli is in line to one day become chief of his village, but first he must prove his manhood by killing a lion. His father has equipped him with a spear, shield and the values of a warrior. Soli's mother reminds him that the ancestors will guide him along the way. However, Soli must go on his journey alone. Does Soli have what it takes to follow through with his rites of passage? DeVaughn's beautiful and colorful illustrations bring this original folktale to life.

Maya Angelou's seven volumes of autobiography are a testament to the talents and resilience of this extraordinary writer. Loving the world, she also knows its cruelty. As a black woman she has known discrimination and extreme poverty, but also hope, joy, achievement and celebration. The fourth volume of her enthralling autobiography finds Maya Angelou immersed in the world of black writers and artists in Harlem, working in the civil rights movement with Martin Luther King.'She has a great capacity for love, to give, and receive it' Margaret Busby

This engaging book chronicles the changes in Maya Angelou's life as she enters the hub of activity that is New York. There, at the Harlem Writers Guild, sherededicates herself to writing, and finds love at an unexpected moment. Reflecting on her many roles--from northern coordinator of Martin Luther King's history-making quest to mother of a rebellious teenage son--Angelou eloquently speaks to an awareness of the heart within us all.

When the Stippled Silver Kennel, Inc., went into the wholesale raising of silver foxes for a world market, its two partners brought to the enterprise a comfortable working capital and an uncomfortable ignorance of the brain-reactions of a fox. They had visited the National Exhibition of silver foxes. They had spent days at successful fox farms, studying every detail of management and memorising the rigid diet-charts. They had committed to memory every fact and hint in Bulletin No. 1151 of the United States Department of Agriculture—issued for the help of novice breeders of silver foxes. They had mastered each and every available scrap of exact information concerning the physical welfare of captive silver foxes. But, for lack of half a lifetime’s close application to the theme, their knowledge of fox mentality and fox nature was nil. Now one may raise chickens or hogs or even cattle, without taking greatly into account the inner workings of such animals’ brains. But no man yet has made a success of raising foxes or their fifth cousin, the collie, without spending more time in studying out the mental than the physical beast. On the kitchen wall of the Stippled Silver Kennel, Inc., was the printed dietary of silver foxes. On the one library shelf of the kennel was all the available literature on silver fox breeding, from government pamphlets to a three-volume monograph. In the four-acre space within the kennel enclosure were thirty model runways, twenty by twenty feet; each equipped with a model shelter-house and ten of them further fitted out with model brood nests. In twenty-four of these thirty model runways abode twenty-four model silver foxes, one to each yard at this autumn season—twenty-four silver foxes, pedigreed and registered—foxes whose lump value was something more than $7,400. Thanks to the balanced rations and meticulous care lavished on them, all twenty-four were in the pink of form. All twenty-four seemed as nearly contented as can a wild thing which no longer has the zest of gambling with death for its daily food and which is stared at with indecent closeness and frequency by dread humans. But the partners of the Stippled Silver Kennel, Inc., failed to take note, among other things, of the uncanny genius certain foxes possess for sapping and mining; nor that some foxes are almost as deft at climbing as is a cinnamon bear. True, the average silver fox is neither a gifted burrower nor climber. But neither are such talents rare. For example, King Whitefoot II, in Number 8 run, could have given a mole useful hints in underground burrowing. Lady Pitchdark, the temperamental young vixen in Number 17 run, might wellnigh have qualified as the vulpine fly. Because neither of these costly specimens spent their time in sporadic demonstration of their arts, in the view of humans, those same humans did not suspect the accomplishments. Then came an ice-bright moonlit night in late November—a night to stir every quadruped’s blood to tingling life and to set humans to crouching over fireplaces. Ten minutes after Rance and Ethan Venner, the kennel partners, finished their perfunctory evening rounds of the yards, King Whitefoot II was blithely at work. Foxes and other burrowing beasts seek instinctively the corners or the edges of yards, when striving to dig a way out. Any student of their ways will tell you that. Wherefore, as in most fox-kennels, the corners and inner edges of the Stippled Silver yards were fringed with a half-yard of mesh-wire, laid flat on the ground. Whitefoot chose a spot six inches on the hither edge of a border-wire and began his tunnel. He did not waste strength by digging deep. He channelled a shallow tube, directly under the flat-laid wire. Indeed, the wire itself formed the top of his tunnel. The frost was not yet deep enough or hard enough to impede his work. Nor, luckily for him, did he have to circumnavigate any big underground rock.

Maya Angelou has fascinated, moved, and inspired countless readers with the first three volumes of her autobiography, one of the most remarkable personal narratives of our age. Now, in her fourth volume, The Heart of a Woman, her turbulent life breaks wide open with joy as the singer-dancer enters the razzle-dazzle of fabulous New York City. There, at the Harlem Writers Guild, her love for writing blazes anew. Her compassion and commitment lead her to respond to the fiery times by becoming the northern coordinator of Martin Luther King's history-making quest. A tempestuous, earthy woman, she promises her heart to one man only to have it stolen, virtually on her weding day, by a passionate African freedom fighter. Filled with unforgettable vignettes of famous characters, from Billie Holiday to Malcolm X, The Heart of a Woman sings with Maya Angelou's eloquent prose -- her fondest dreams, deepest disappointments, and her dramatically tender relationship with her rebellious teenage son. Vulnerable, humorous, tough, Maya speaks with an intimate awareness of the heart within all of us.