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Summary: For Your Career's Sake
Review: Why should an adult in a career transition take the time to read a 300-page book on a woman who has been dead since 1919? What does the daughter of freed slaves, who lived through reconstruction, Jim Crow, and the Harlem Renaissance have to say to us of the high-tech twenty-first century? Why do we read about the development of hair care products which have long been replaced and improved upon?Fair questions. This new biography, written by the great-great granddaughter of Madam Walker, will surprise you, educate you, and (most importantly) motivate you. You have obstacles based on age, obsolete education, debt from college loans, child care problems, lack of confidence? Try comparing those with no education, a body stressed by laundry work and harsh chemicals, several husbands who abused her trust and undermined her business, mixed messages by her own community (including Booker T. Washington) about successful women, and an ungrateful daughter who never measured up to her work ethic and who enjoyed spending her mother's money. Ms. Bundles, whose journalism credentials include a Columbia University education and experience as deputy bureau chief in the ABC News Bureau in Washington, has told the story of Madam Walker within the context that few of us have been taught. From the records of post-civil war Louisiana to nineteenth-century segregated railway journeys to northern cities, from the St. Louis World's Fair displays of ranking levels of civilization by race to the role influential African Americans played demanding justice for returning black soldiers from World War I, this book presents the cultural contexts which have been too long denied. Read this book for inspiration. Read this book for understanding. Read this book because a potential employer might ask you, "What have you read recently?" You'll be proud of your answer.
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