ChildrensPictureBook.info Review

Vision of Beauty: The Story of Sarah Breedlove Walker
By Kathryn Lasky
Illustrator Nineka Bennett
Publisher Candlewick Press

When we choose a biography for our children, we are given the opportunity to give them an example of a person who has lived life well. Sarah Breedlove Walker, better known as Madam C.J.Walker, lived just 51 years, but she lived life well. Born just two years after the end of slavery in Delta, Louisiana to share cropper parents, her story is one of triumph over adversity. She went from doing other peoples laundry to owning one of the largest companies in American in the early twentieth century.

Her preparations for the hair were designed to give black women healthy scalps and hair and were sold door to door by hundreds of black women. Walker did more than create a beneficial line of hair care products; she sold the message that black women could be successful businesswomen. Her message of self-sufficiency went out in one-on-one fashion. With the wealth she gained, she was able to bless the African American community that had enabled her to become a success. She was a businesswoman and a philanthropist who died with the words, "I want to live to help my race," on her lips.

Vision of Beauty is a well-written biography that will encourage your children to become overcomers. It’s an excellent choice for reading during African American history month in February or for your American history studies of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Vision of Beauty

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