Google Preview

• 1 of 1 person find this helpful

  • A beautiful memoir

  • Frank McCourt is an amazing storyteller! It's funny, heartbreaking, and charming all at once. These kind of books are rare, so do yourself a favor and read this. It's sure to inspire and change your life!

    

    Is this helpful?

• ― MoirneStark said on Jun 23, 2008 | Add your feedback

• .

  • 364 p. : ill. ; 25 cm.

    

    Is this helpful?

• ― Brian Hamilton said on May 7, 2007 about the Hardcover edition| Add your feedback

"When I look back on my childhood I wonder how I managed to survive at all. It was, of course, a miserable childhood: the happy childhood is hardly worth your while. Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood, and worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood."

So begins the luminous memoir of Frank McCourt, born in Depression-era Brooklyn to recent Irish immigrants and raised in the slums of Limerick, Ireland. Frank's mother, Angela, has no money to feed the children since Frank's father, Malachy, rarely works, and when he does he drinks his wages. Yet Malachy -- exasperating, irresponsible and beguiling -- does nurture in Frank an appetite for the one thing he can provide: a story. Frank lives for his father's tales of Cuchulain, who saved Ireland, and of the Angel on the Seventh Step, who brings his mother babies.

Perhaps it is story that accounts for Frank's survival. Wearing rags for diapers, begging a pig's head for Christmas dinner and gathering coal from the roadside to light a fire, Frank endures poverty, near-starvation and the casual cruelty of relatives and neighbors -- yet lives to tell his tale with eloquence, exuberance and remarkable forgiveness.

Angela's Ashes, imbued on every page with Frank McCourt's astounding humor and compassion, is a glorious book that bears all the marks of a classic.

Groups with this in collection

NY Times Notable Book Club (67)

• Irelandchildhoodimmigrantsmemoirautobiography"Intense ReadsBooks I've Read"slums1996irish literature
• See all (32)