Mom & Me & Mom - Maya Angelou

The story of Maya Angelou’s extraordinary life has been chronicled in her multiple bestselling autobiographies. But now, at last, the legendary author shares the deepest personal story of her life: her relationship with her mother.

For the first time, Angelou reveals the triumphs and struggles of being the daughter of Vivian Baxter, an indomitable spirit whose petite size belied her larger-than-life presence—a presence absent during much of Angelou’s early life. When her marriage began to crumble, Vivian famously sent three-year-old Maya and her older brother away from their California home to live with their grandmother in Stamps, Arkansas. The subsequent feelings of abandonment stayed with Angelou for years, but their reunion, a decade later, began a story that has never before been told. In Mom & Me & Mom, Angelou dramatizes her years reconciling with the mother she preferred to simply call “Lady,” revealing the profound moments that shifted the balance of love and respect between them.

Delving into one of her life’s most rich, rewarding, and fraught relationships, Mom & Me & Mom explores the healing and love that evolved between the two women over the course of their lives, the love that fostered Maya Angelou’s rise from immeasurable depths to reach impossible heights.

Praise for Mom & Me & Mom

“Mom & Me & Mom is delivered with Angelou’s trademark good humor and fierce optimism. If any resentments linger between these lines, if lives are partially revealed without all the bitter details exposed, well, that is part of Angelou’s forgiving design. As an account of reconciliation, this little book is just revealing enough, and pretty irresistible.”—The Washington Post

“Moving . . . a remarkable portrait of two courageous souls.”—People

“[The] latest, and most potent, of her serial autobiographies . . . [a] tough-minded, tenderhearted addition to Angelou’s spectacular canon.”—Elle

“Mesmerizing . . . Angelou has a way with words that can still dazzle us, and with her mother as a subject, Angelou has a near-perfect muse and mystery woman.”—Essence

“True to her style, [Angelou’s] writing cuts to the chase with compression and simplicity, and there in the background is a calypso smoothness, flurries and showers of musicality between the moments of wickedness. . . . A tightly strung, finely tuned memoir about life with her mother.”—Kirkus Reviews

“In this loving recollection of a complicated relationship, Angelou for the first time details the mother-daughter journey to reconciliation and unwavering connection and support. . . . Angelou vividly portrays a spirited woman. . . . [A] remarkable and deeply revealing chronicle of love and healing.”—Booklist

“Written with her customary eloquence . . . follows in the episodic style of Angelou’s earlier volumes of autobiography, pulling the reader along effortlessly. The lessons and the love presented here will speak to those trying to make their way in the world.”—Publishers Weekly

“In straightforward style, Mom & Me & Mom dives deeply into Angelou’s complicated relationship with her mother. . . . At 84, Angelou shows few signs of slowing down.”—BookPage



Letter to My Daughter - Maya Angelou

Dedicated to the daughter she never had but sees all around her, Letter to My Daughter reveals Maya Angelou’s path to living well and living a life with meaning. Here in short spellbinding essays are glimpses of the tumultuous life that taught Angelou lessons in compassion and fortitude: how she was brought up by her indomitable grandmother in segregated Arkansas, taken in at thirteen by her more worldly and less religious mother, and grew to be an awkward six-foot-tall teenager whose first experience of loveless sex paradoxically left her with her greatest gift, a son.

Whether she is recalling lost friends such as Coretta Scott King and Ossie Davis, extolling honesty, decrying vulgarity, explaining why becoming a Christian is a “lifelong endeavor,” or simply singing the praises of a meal of red rice, Maya Angelou writes from the heart to millions of women she considers her extended family.

 Letter to My Daughter (2009) is the third book of essays by African American writer and poet Maya Angelou. By the time it was published, Angelou had written two other books of essays, several volumes of poetry, and six autobiographies. She was recognized and highly respected as a spokesperson for Blacks and women, and had become "a major autobiographical voice of the time".  Angelou had no daughters herself, but was inspired to write Letter as she was going through 20 years of notes and essay ideas, some of which were written for her friend Oprah Winfrey. Angelou wrote the book for the thousands of women who saw her as a mother figure, and to share the wisdom gained throughout her long life.


I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings - Maya Angelou

Here is a book as joyous and painful, as mysterious and memorable, as childhood itself. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings captures the longing of lonely children, the brute insult of bigotry, and the wonder of words that can make the world right. Maya Angelou’s debut memoir, first published in 1969, is a modern American classic beloved worldwide.

Sent by their mother to live with their devout, self-sufficient grandmother in a small Southern town, Maya and her brother, Bailey, endure the ache of abandonment and the prejudice of the local “powhitetrash.” At eight years old and back at her mother’s side in St. Louis, Maya is attacked by a man many times her age—and has to live with the consequences for a lifetime. Years later, in San Francisco, Maya learns that love for herself, the kindness of others, her own strong spirit, and the ideas of great authors (“I met and fell in love with William Shakespeare”) will allow her to be free instead of imprisoned.

Poetic and powerful, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings will touch hearts and change minds for as long as people read.

“I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings liberates the reader into life simply because Maya Angelou confronts her own life with such a moving wonder, such a luminous dignity.”—James Baldwin


Amazon Fire Phone

Amazon’s Fire Phone innovates with its four-camera configuration. It innovates with its object-identifying Firefly feature. And it innovates with its Mayday feature that provides face-to-tracked-face assistance on the go.

But one way in which it doesn’t innovate may be the way that most people were hoping it would: price. Available for $199 on a two-year AT&T contract or $649 unlocked, the Fire Phone is similar to other premium phones such as the iPhone 5S and Samsung Galaxy S5.

The Fire Phone’s failure to disrupt has led many to question whether it is keeping the Amazon flame. Indeed, the cellular options available to Fire Phone buyers are less creative than the limited free data option Amazon offered with AT&T at the release of the Kindle Fire HD.

The Fire Phone features a 2.2GHz quad-core Snapdragon 800 CPU with an Adreno 330 GPU and 2GB of RAM, comparable to the Galaxy S5's 2.5Ghz quad-core CPU. Its 2,400mAh battery is slightly smaller than the Galaxy S5's 2,800mAh battery, though Amazon claims it can provide up to 22 hours of talk time, 65 hours of audio playback, or 11 hours of video playback.

There's also a 13-megapixel camera, an f/2.0 lens, and optical image stabilization. Bezos compared the Fire Phone to the iPhone 5S and the Samsung Galaxy S5, saying that no matter the situation the Fire Phone will take better shots. There's a quick-access shutter button on the side, and unlimited cloud storage for your photos. That's where Amazon has an advantage, really, its ability to do cloud storage cheaply and well.

It runs Amazon's Android-based Fire OS 3.5, with a couple of new tweaks. The carousel of recent items is still foremost on the device, but there are "active widgets" underneath showing recent activity in those apps as you swipe through them. Everywhere else, there's a three-paneled design: one for navigation, one for your primary content, one for what Bezos called "a delighter," things like song lyrics in the music app.

Gorilla Glass 3 is slathered on the front and back, the buttons are made of aluminum and stainless steel details and a rubberized polyurethane grip make for a chic profile.

Taking advantage of Amazon's digital content library, the Fire provides "instant access" to over 33 million songs, apps, games, movies, TV shows, books, audiobooks and magazines. Prime members will get unlimited streaming access to movies and TV episodes at no extra chard. The same sort of deal applies to Kindle Owners' Lending Library and Prime Music members.

The idea is to be able to send an email, make a call, save a contact or go to a website without having to type it all into your phone.

And that leaves us with the question of carrier. Taking a page from the first iPhone launch, you can get the Fire on any carrier you like -- as long as it's AT&T. In an age when the iPhone and Android phones are available on pretty much any carrier, being locked into AT&T could be a non-starter for many folks.

The Fire has some exciting and innovative features. In many ways, it's the phone Apple fans were hoping the 5s would be last fall. But those innovative features walk a fine line between cool and gimmicky. Perhaps Amazon is banking on its general goodwill being the secret sauce that sways consumers to the Fire.


The Fault in Our Stars - John Green

The Fault in Our Stars is the sixth novel by author John Green, published in January 2012. The story is narrated by a sixteen-year-old cancer patient named Hazel, who is forced by her parents to attend a support group, where she subsequently meets and falls in love with the seventeen-year-old Augustus Waters, an ex-basketball player and amputee.

The title is inspired from Act 1, Scene 2 of Shakespeare's play Julius Caesar, in which the nobleman Cassius says to Brutus: "The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, / But in ourselves, that we are underlings."

A feature film adaptation of the novel directed by Josh Boone and starring Shailene Woodley, Ansel Elgort and Nat Wolff was released on June 6, 2014.

Green stated that the first inspiration for The Fault in Our Stars came from when he worked as a student chaplain at a children's hospital. He found the children to be as human as healthy people, and wanted to capture the feeling that "the stories that I was reading sort of oversimplified and sometimes even dehumanized them. And I think generally we have a habit of imagining the very sick or the dying as being kind of fundamentally other. I guess I wanted to argue for their humanity, their complete humanity."

e was initially intimidated by the idea and knew that it was not his story to tell, but said he has received positive comments from sick children. The novel was also influenced by Esther Earl, a girl whom Green was friends with who died when she was 16 years old of thyroid cancer. Green credits Earl for inspiring him to finally write the book, as she demonstrated how a short life could also be a full one. Green was able to add the humor he wanted to the story, as in 2000 when he received the inspiration at the hospital he was too angry at people dying young that he did not feel he would be able to capture the complexity of their lives. In its early stages, the novel was about a group of young cancer patients who formed a "Dead Person's Society", and would sneak out to convene in a cave near the children's hospital. The birth of his first child during the writing process also influenced The Fault in Our Stars, as it allowed him to understand the love between parent and child.

Green once considered writing the story from Isaac's point of view, as it fit into the epic genre, going so far as the storyteller being blind. Ultimately, he decided to use Hazel's point of view, as books rarely depict cancer patients from their point of view. Hazel's father's belief that "the universe wants to be noticed" came from YouTuber Vi Hart, who explained her point of view to Green in conversation. Green has stated that the last line of the book, "I do", symbolizes marriage because "Shakespeare's comedies end in marriage and his tragedies end in death, and I was rather fond of the idea that my book could end (symbolically, at least) in both."


Avada | Responsive Multi-Purpose Theme

Avada | Responsive Multi-Purpose Theme


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Avada | Responsive Multi-Purpose Theme

Avada | Responsive Multi-Purpose Theme

Avada | Responsive Multi-Purpose Theme

StereoClub - Music WordPress Theme


The StereoClub is a premium and modern WordPress Theme ideal for Music & Events, Bands, DJs, NightClubs and other music related websites.

The responsive design makes it easily usable with any device (Desktop, tablet, mobile phone…), without removing any content!

Theme Features:

  • Responsive design (Mobile first);
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  • Full HTML5 and CSS3;
  • mp3 Player with playlists;
  • PSD Included;
  • HTML files Included;
  • Custom Background;
  • Custom Logo;
  • Custom Favicon;
  • Custom Posts Type:
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    • DJ;
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  • FlexSlider;
  • Custom Widgets:
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    • Widget DJ;
    • Widget Events;
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    • Widget Flickr;
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  • WordPress APIs respected;
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  • Microformats;
  • Cross-browser compatibility;
  • Threaded Comments;
  • Gravatar ready;
  • Custom thumbnail images; 
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