Angelas Ashes Cd

Rating:
Summary: A book I can't wait to share with others
Review: One of, if not the best book I've read. The ability to turn a tear into a smile within the same sentence is a gift. A gift passed on to him from a father who gave him little else. I gave this book a nine instead of a ten because Frank McCourt, by making us care so deeply about his family, made us a promise to give us the end of the story. What happened to Angela, the brothers or his father that I want to hate but can't. I was left hanging and wanting more. Yes, I know it's a writer's job to leave us wanting more but.....I guess I'll have to wait for the second book of the trilogy won't I. Mr. McCourt, you have touched me. I will remember Angela well

Rating:
Summary: Positively wonderful
Review: The minute I opened this book I was spellbound by Frank McCourt's accounting of his childhood. His writing is captivating and wonderful. This has to be one of the most outstanding memoirs I have ever had the pleasure to read. I only hope he continues his tale into his adult life in New York. He is the personification of the American Dream. Kudos to you, Mr. McCourt

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Summary: this is a truly memorable book
Review: Seldom have I read a book as compelling and memorable. This book is about the triumph of the spirit, even considering the catalogue of childhood horrors Mr. McCourt provides. When I finished it, first I wanted to dance a jig; then I wanted everyone I know to read it

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Summary: could not put the book down
Review: wonderful-sad-enlightening-funny-so true----> no cod!!!! how many times i heard my own mom say " you're not codding me are you?" took me back to my home yet i was born in canada of Irish catholic parents rec'd the book from my brother and am passing it on to friends would love to meet frank and talk about his youth and where he is today-----> in therapy????

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Summary: A word for the review-maligned father . . .
Review: It's all been said about the flow of language, the tragic elements that make one laugh, but where did Frank McCourt come from? He points out more than once in the book that redemption, hope, and salvation appear in the same places as the horror and cruelty. We have Father Gregory, the Franciscan priest who hears the unconfessable sins; Seamus, who was kind and perceptive beyond his station in the typhoid ward; O'Halloran the headmaster who extended respect as well as expectations to young Frank's lively mind; and most of all there was Malachy, Frank McCourt's father. Excluded by his "odd manner" and northern origins from the community that might have embraced him, drunken and selfish and irresponsible as he was, he also shines out from the book in two of his three forms -- a very Celtic image. He filled young Frank with stories and the love of a well-told-tale, with Irish history and world affairs, with dreams and goals. "When you have your father to yourself by the fire in the morning, you don't need Cuchulain or the Angel on the Seventh Step or anything." It would have been easy for the author to make this book a diatribe of resentment against one or both of his parents for the life he lived as a child. That it is filled with love and understanding is a testament to the strength and power of a family and a community in the worst of circumstances

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Summary: Is the acclaim to blame?...
Review: Frank McCourt's relentless catalogue of the horrors of his upbringing, while accurate in his case, were not typical of the vast majority of Irish poor of that time. His family life was an extreme - his father was an extreme - the death of three siblings was an extreme. McCourt does a wonderful job portraying his mother's courage and in showing the psychic baggage the Irish Catholic poor are lumbered with. But this is a mightily flawed book and the acclaim it is receiving astounds me. The child's point of view is finally tedious and wears us down; the pathos is well-worn and tired; the book lacks any lyricism. This is a still-born book and McCourt should try again to give us the book that all the critics are raving about.

Rating:
Summary: How sad....How wonderful
Review: McCourt's Angela"s Ashes is worth its weight in gold and I found it to be a good read but also informative about history/religion and it's effect on our culture. I gave the book to several senior's including my mother who found the book too difficult because it made them relive their poverty and many painful memories. To those who have lost children or siblings through poverty you may want to avoid this book because it is painful enough to read without having to have gone through that experience oneself.

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Summary: A gripping memior of a miserable Irish Catholic childhood.
Review: Having spent a year's worth of High School English with Mr. McCourt, I thought there would be very little that I hadn't heard. I was wrong. Mr. McCourt has written a wonderful tale about growing up poor in the USA and Ireland (in that order) With all the bad that happens, Mr. McCourt keeps tone with an almost youthful innocence. I cried at the same time that I was laughing. For a first book (at the age of 66), it is very impressive. You'll enjoy it.

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Summary: Out of the ashes
Review: For the reader who is not Irish, Catholic, raised in poverty and abuse, or the child of an alcoholic parent, Angela's Ashes still provides flashes of recognition because it speaks eloquently about what it means to be a child -- to both accept and be confused about the behavior of adults, to misunderstand and feel misunderstood, to feel shame and embarrassment, to taunt or be taunted by peers, to experience deep disappointments or delight in simple pleasures, to stumble innocently into situations that are either immensely fortunate or comically tragic, to resist and succumb to temptation, to mourn loss, feel regrets and wonder if you are the only person in the world who feels the way you do. This is also a book about what it means to be a parent--to have pride in one's children, great hopes for them and miserable feelings of failure when things go terribly wrong. Angela's Ashes is an antithesis to the victim literature prominent during this decade, although it contains all the necessary ingredients: physical and mental abuse by family, friends, teachers and priests; alcoholism that robs the family of food, dignity and stability; children and adults who live and die without hope, in conditions of unspeakable misery. But while this book has victims, it is more densely populated with heroes who declare their aliveness in small, but triumphant ways. As the Irish cope with unbelievable living and working conditions, they laugh at the absurdity of life and infuse bits of meaning into the worst that happens to them. What creates this hardiness, this softening of experience with humor, this drive for survival in the midst of squalor? How does this child, for God's sake, continue with intelligence and sanity in situations that have destroyed the adults around him? These are the questions that are addressed in Angela's Ashes by a protagonist who refuses to be a victim and thereby saves himself from disabling pity and us from the crippling ennui that results from an endless recitation of unaddressable human grief. Few survive childhood unmarked by physical or emotional scars,intentionally or unintentionally inflicted. Frank McCourt has obviously spent his adulthood reflecting on his experience and remarked in an interview that he had to tell this story or burst. But he does not tell it to court pity. Perhaps, like accounts of the Holocaust, his story puts our own griefs into perspective and encourages us to heal our wounds by looking at the absurd nature of much of life. Pain is not funny, but our interpretation of it can lesson its influence as a driving force in our lives.

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Summary: Relive childhood, for better and for worse.
Review: If you were ever a child you'll float back, as on a raft down a rushing river, to the time when reality couldn't keep you down. And while you're there, you'll be reliving Frank McCourt's childhood in the Ireland of the 1930's and 40's. It's an almost stream of consciousness style of thought, but then again, clear and concise and explicit. Mr. McCourt manages to write poetry as prose,while he recounts his childhood of near starvation in impoverished slums. The dialog flows with the beautiful rhythms that only the Irish could ever make out of English. And while you drink a cup of tea made of used tea leaves, swing on the chains by the River Shannon, soaking wet and wait hungry with him for Pa to bring back the pay which he never does, you'll find yourself there, back in time, living it with all the empathy you've got. Reading this book, it's childhood again, no matter where you lived it, or how. It's definitely not just for the Irish or the Catholics, only. It's for everybody, old or young. I loved this book and I'm so glad it was written. Thanks, Frank.