About the Author

Dennis Love (right) is a freelance journalist who has worked for The Arizona Republic, UPI, the Los Angeles Daily News, and The Orange County Register. He lives in Sacramento, California. Stacy Brown (left) is also a journalist who has worked for the Los Angeles Daily News and the Los Angeles Times Community News, and he currently works for The Journal News in Westchester, New York. This is the first book for each of th

Reviews

In 1973, when Stevie Wonder's Innervisions won a Grammy Award for Album of the Year, he refused to accept the award unless his mother, Lula Hardaway, walked to the stage with him. From the podium, he announced, "Her strength has led us to this place." Like many African Americans of her generation, Hardaway was a part of the great migration north in pre-Civil Rights Alabama. Born in a sharecropper's shack in Alabama's Black Belt, she didn't know her mother or her father and was passed from relative to relative, forced to earn her keep, and constantly reminded that her presence caused a financial hardship. As a teenager looking for a better life, Hardaway was sent to Chicago, where she married a much older abusive man who forced her into prostitution. She eventually ran away and settled in Detroit. Wonder, born blind, was her third child. Hardaway wanted him to have the miracle of sight; to that end, she took him to specialists and faith healers, but to no avail. Yet her son was funny, smart, outgoing, and musically inclined; his talent caught the attention of Berry Gordy, who called him "Little Stevie Wonder" and signed him to the Motown label. Read by Viola Davis, Blind Faith is the dual story of a mother's love and the making of a musician. Recommended for all public libraries with large popular biography sections.-Pam Kingsbury, Florence, AL Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.