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• 2 people find this helpful

  • A beautiful memoir

  • Frank McCourt is an amazing storyteller! It's funny, heartbreaking, and charming all at once. Meaningful books like this are rare, so do yourself a favor and give it a try. It's sure to inspire and change your life!

    

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

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  • Love memoirs and this one ranks in my top 10!
    This is one really heart wrenching story & very moving.
    A super read!

    

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• ― Nini said on Nov 16, 2009 about the Hardcover edition| Add your feedback

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  • 364 p. : ill. ; 25 cm.

    

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• ― 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.

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• Biography/MemoirsNon-FictionLimerickpoor familyfamilyirish-americanIrelandchildhoodimmigrantsmemoir
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