"Maya Angelou’s final work, published a year before her death, in 2013, when she was 85 years old. It was the first book to focus on her mother, Vivian Baxter, who abandoned Angelou when she was a child and it portrays their complicated relationship. The story is about the special connection between mother and child; both women found a way to move on and form a profound and enduring bond of love and support."

"Luckily, I found this book in paperback when I was eleven. It is a book that should be required reading at a young age. Malcom X’s mind, struggle, fight, pain and truth will live on because this book will keep popping brains open. Look past the propaganda machine that reduces his role in history; there is a whole world of thought here, and that is a world I like to be in."

"My father in law, Victor Levenstein, just finished writing his own memoirs about his early life and surviving torture and forced labor in the Gulags. He met Solzhenitsyn while in exile and was in the same camp that is described in “A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich”. I found this book to be deeply profound in observing humans at their absolute worst while never missing the big story of human nature."

"This is a portrait of a city I love as well as a self-portrait of a woman who changed my life profoundly, and who I miss every day. Through the oral history tradition she helped found with her groundbreaking book, “Edie,” Stein chronicled the histories of prominent Los Angeles families, including her own, through edited interviews with a huge cast of characters, a masterwork by the most intuitive conversationalist I ever knew."