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Summary: Everyone of Irish heritage must read this book
Review: Written with refreshing honesty, feeling and humour. It is hard to put into words the range and depth of emotions one feels whilst reading this book. It is a book that should be read by anyone with Irish parents raised during the 30's in order that they may understand. Thank you Mum & Dad. Thank you Mr McCourt.
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Summary: A Fantastic Journey I did not want to end
Review: Wonderful! I simply could not put this book down and felt compelled to shut myself in until I reached the very last delicious page. A simple, lyrical and painfully honest work. Loved it! Am stunned in a void until I find another book as worthy.
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Summary: Like the curate's egg -- good in parts
Review: There is no doubt that 'Angel's Ashes' is a well-written page-turner, but does it have the deep truth that characterises great literature? In part, the trouble stems from it's essentially autobiographical character, and just how much and what the author should tell. I suspect that Angela McCourt would never want anyone to know of her liason with her cousin -- but her son has chosen to tell the world. OK, she's dead and gone now but somehow it seems exploititive. As for the ending of the book, this was the greatest letdown of all. A gratuitious and shabby encounter with the wives of married men is supposed to somehow represent the hope and promise of a new land and a new start. Why oh why did this non-event mark the end of an overwise very good book.
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Summary: "Laughter is a reprieve: we laugh so as not to cry"
Review: What amazes me is that amidst all the pain, suffering and abject poverty, the author and his family never gave in to despair but were always hopeful! And the other thing that touched me is the love that was always there whatever happened ... between his parents, among the brothers and most especially Frank's for his father! I'll never forget this book!
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Summary: Angela's Ashes were shoveled into my heart
Review: After finishing Frank McCourt's masterpiece I could hardly start another book. What could ever compare? Who would ever speak to me so honestly and sweetly? Angela's ashes were shoveled into my heart. I will never get the picture of Angela, staring into the ashes, unable to save her life or the lives of her children out of my mind. Being of Irish ancestry, this story touched me as no other probably could have. I personally recognized so many of the sayings, ways, and behaviors of the Irish. I felt shame at the way the McCourts treated their children and at the way their Irish neighbors turned their cruel backs to each other. I did, however find hope in the few individuals who saw intelligence and sparkle in the little boy who stood before them starving and ugly. They gave him the best advice they ever could have: Get yourself to America, Frank. And he did, thank Jesus, Mary and Holy St. Joseph.
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Summary: A book that moved me deeply
Review: I listened to Frank McCourt describe his childhood on the Rosie O'Donnell show and was interested to read more. As I looked at the cover and read his line, "Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood. Worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood.", I was more intrigued then ever. Even though the story was deeply moving, his struggle to make his life better inspired me. I cannot wait for the sequel to this book to pick up in New York with Mr. McCourt. This book should be an absolute read for anyone feeling depressed about their circumstances. Mr. McCourt's vivid descriptions made me feel like I was standing in his house at times. Thank you for sharing your story with us.
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Summary: Stunning prose and heart
Review: When I finished this touching memoir, I realized that a man with these gifts chose to teach in the New York City public schools. Perhaps there is hope for our schools after all.
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Summary: Funny but Sad too
Review: I really enjoyed this book. Can't believe anyone could actually survive such terrible living conditions! But Frank McCourt writes in such a way that even though I feel sorry for the family, I also feel a whole lot of respect for their resilience. I like the way Frank McCourt writes- as if he is talking to you as a child. He manages to describe his living environment so as to enable us to have a clear and vivid picture of his hometown, but at the same time he doesn't bore us with complicated details and long-winded "talk". I also really enjoyed the innocence and humour which seems to have been an important part of the writer's life. I think this keeps the tone from turning into one of self-pity. I think Frank McCourt is a great writer and I hope there's a sequel to this wonderful memoir.
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Summary: Frank McCourt practices what he teaches!
Review: I bought this book because, 23 years ago, I was one of the many students who took Frank McCourt's very popular Creative Writing course at Stuyvesant High School. Frank stressed a particular theme in his teaching: good writing is suprising. Forget every lesson previous English teachers have taught, or else you'll produce platitudes, not creative writing. He hammered this lesson home in everything he taught. He made us read satire. He assigned writing tasks that sounded prosaic and made fun of us if we wrote something prosaic. For example, he asked us to write a love letter and a hate letter. He liked my love letter to a dead dog. He adored Jonathan G's obscenely funny hate letter to a public figure. Frank was completely at ease with students, he was charismatic, he entertained us, he spoke with us and never down to us, and yet he was always an authority figure. And he talked constantly about his brother Malachy, who at the time hosted a New York area radio show. The first chapter of _Angela's Ashes_, about McCourt's earliest childhood in Brooklyn, New York, brought me back to my high school friendship with Jessica O'C. I recall Jessica, who was so proud of being Irish-American, because her family's troubles sound so much like those of Frank McCourt's family, and Frank McCourt sees these troubles as characteristically Irish. Ireland, devastated and robbed repeatedly by the English, beset with European class distinctions and snobberies, structured by the inscrutable Roman Catholic Church, cursed physiologically or culturally with a craving for alcohol, had only a harsh life to offer many of its people. Disabled or alcoholic fathers allowed their hard-to-find jobs to lapse, their families to starve; babies and toddlers died from parental ignorance, from cold, wet, crowded, filthy housing, their immune systems weak from months or years of gradual starvation. In these impoverished conditions, however, just as in my friend's family, surprisingly educated intelligences flourished, songs and stories were traded, and dazzling bits of beauty were rendered tragic by their surroundings. Frank McCourt describes all of this through the eyes of a gradually maturing child. At first the child sees only what is immediate: his family, the relationships that are the substance of his life. As his circle widens, he begins to glimpse the social and religious conditions that structured his childhood. He learns more about his parents' lives and begins to appreciate the tragedy of the unforeseen turns their lives have taken. Irish songs and myths animate his telling of the story, anchoring it culturally in the pleasure the Irish take in recitation, in the ways his own life repeats the songs, in the interpretive lens these songs and stories must have offered his earlier childish understandings of life. McCourt takes seriously the principle he taught his writing students: go for the unusual, the surprising. The story unfolds through what looks on paper like Irish idioms, Irish customs, Irish understandings. As the story's narrator matures, the perspective always shifts slightly. And the reader is always a bit on edge emotionally, as McCourt shifts back and forth between the comic and the tragic, never allowing the reader to become bored with an emotional plateau. (Just when I thought I couldn't take any more dead babies, for example, just as tears were streaming down my cheeks and I was about to put down the book for good, McCourt launched into a wonderful satire of the Catholic Church, through the eyes of a little boy studying for his First Communion.) The book jacket also says "Winner of the Pulitzer Prize." I agree, it's a good book. It hardly matches an old Pulitzer prizewinning book I read recently, Annie Dillard's _Pilgrim at Tinker Creek_ for philosophical depth, scientific breadth, or even sheer literacy. But it drew me into its world. Bits of the book kept popping up in my memory, and I often mistook them for fragments of my own recent dreams. Scenes from the book seemed to play on the horizon of my den as I attempted to engage in routine activities, like building block towers with my children. Not only did the book draw me in, however, it also dumped me back out into my own world with some fresh understandings about Ireland, poverty, childhood, character, determination, satire, my high school writing teacher, and, of course, writing and storytelling themselves.
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Summary: What? How Did that End?
Review: This book was great right up until the last few pages and then...WHAT? After that horrible childhood of poverty, he did WHAT? He steals money from a dead woman and gets HIMSELF out of poverty, leaving everyone else behind without so much as a fare-thee-well, has a tawdry fling with some low-lifes and decides that he has finally arrived? Didn't he learn anything at all from his mother's struggles? Shame on the author for telling tales that reflect so poorly on himself and, by extension, on the mother that raised him!
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