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Summary: DEPRESSING YET UPLIFTING, AND YES ITS HILLARIOUS!
Review: What a depressing yet uplifting tale told from the eldest childs perspective (Mr Frank McCourt) narrating his families harrowing life in hilarious detail while growing up in Limerick, Ireland. Dispite their tragic circumstances, Frank and his brother (I hesitate to use family, youll see why when you read this excellent story for yourself! ) manage to rise above it all using humour and streetwise intelligence to see them through. Their Mother and Father never manage to cope well, both trying to run from their problems instead of facing them, thankfully dispite all the awful things they go through Frank is able to colour the greyness of their lives with his brilliant mind. Franks description of family and school life is so funny that rather than weeping tears and bemoaning their fate (and there was plenty to cry about! believe me! )I was laughing instead, this is a sure sign of excellent writing, that though you sympathise with their circumstances, your able to laugh freely, even when their lives are at their most desperate. Thankyou Mr McCourt for this Depressing yet wonderfully told tale of an Impoverished Irish/Catholic family (certainly made me appreciate my own upbringing all the more! )BUY IT READ IT JUST GET IT NOW! , ITS HIGHLY RECOMMENDED!
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Summary: A memoir like none other...
Review: Frank McCourt is an artist: his medium is language; his pallet is the world. In the sense of being a true artisan, McCourt has recreated his life as a poor child growing up in Ireland with a realism that is unparalleled. Assisted by an amazing survival story, McCourt uses a style of writing that brings you right into the shoes of little Frankie. McCourt is masterful at evoking the gambit of emotions from the reader. He implants in the reader a seed of hope-the hope that Frankie will be able to overcome the adversity that he meets almost every day of your life. This book gets put down once-when you are done. Highly recommended for any reader.
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Summary: Interesting
Review: It is amazing that a man could live through the things Mr. McCourt did and not only find the courage to write about it, but to be humorous and uplifting about it. The child in the book knew his lot in life and still enjoyed it. What a lesson for us all to appreciate the things we have and love those around us while we have them. This book was inspiring and oddly enough, although it was terribly depressing in many parts, it was genuinely uplifting as well. The courage and strength of Frank and his mother and brothers should be a lesson to us all that there is always a bright side to life if we only look for it hard enough. I would recommend this book to anyone.
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Summary: Angela's Ashes
Review: This is the saddest, most depressing, funny story of survival I've ever read. The McCourts live in the most dismal poverty imaginable in Limerick, Ireland. The father is a drunken bum who cannot hold a job but is a wonderful storyteller and a good singer. Whenever he gets a job he only keeps it until the first payday because he goes on a drunken binge. The mother, Angela always has hope that he will change. They are on the dole and have to beg for help from the church. Frank and his younger brothers have to go out and pick up bits of coal in the streets of Limerick. At Christmas, Angela and Frank and Malachy (six and five years old) go to the butcher to beg for meat for their Christmas dinner. The butcher gives them a pigs'head wrapped in newspaper. Frank has to carry it home. The bloody newspaper falls away and the neighbors can see what he is carrying and that they won't have a decent dinner for Christmas. Their father can't go out and beg or pick coal bits from the streets because it is beneath his dignity. Throughout his childhood Frank always has hopes and dreams of a better life. He is forced to commit petty thievery many times to help his mother. The Catholic Church shuns the family although they are very devout. Frank is a good student but there is no one to help him further his education after grade school. He goes to work delivering telegrams and writing letters for a loan officer when he is fourteen. It takes him five years to save enough money to pay his way to America. The book ends as he reaches America. He apparently got a college degree and taught writing at the high school level. This is a fascinating book and one that I will not forget easily. Frank McCourt found humor in the squalor of his childhood and I was amazed at the eternal optimism his family had.
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Summary: This book was really really helpful to me
Review: Angelas Ashes is a fantastic book. It shows us just how good we have it. It is a great memoir both funny and forgiving. Frank McCourt is stunning and will leave an impression on every readers mind. It's about a boy living in poverty that has a drunken father and a begging mother. He has an abusive teacher and abusive relatives. He lives in an ally where everybody throws their wastes to the streets,and smells rank all the time. To read this book you have to understand it from the beginning to the end. I would recomend this book to ages 15and up, because it was hard for me to read and understand and i am only 14.
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Summary: A textbook on surviving poverty.
Review: Via his childhood memories, Frank McCourt offers a poignant, unflinching view of a poverty so grinding and oppressive as to certainly be almost unimaginable by most readers. Indeed, I had to frequently remind myself that the years described were endured not in some pestilential Victorian-era slum, but in the mid-1900's. My only criticism is the lack of an epilogue to the story. What ever happened to the elder Malachy McCourt, Frank's father, a devastating testimonial to a life wasted by alcohol abuse and a peculiar melancholy which is endemic, I suspect, to the Irish? And Angela, Frank's mother, a sure candidate for sainthood if measured by her daily struggles to keep her children fed and alive? I hope God blessed Angela's ashes and rewarded her with riches in heaven. Oh, and the book is much better than the movie adaptation (3 stars) as the former has better continuity between events, though the latter has stunning visuals and superb acting performances.
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Summary: What Else Can I Say? I Loved This Book!
Review: I don't usually read this type of thing but someone loaned it to me so I thought, let's see what the fuss is all about. It's worth the fuss. McCourt's prose is so descriptive you can smell the atmosphere (and the dirty people). The humor comes at moments you least suspect. If I had to complain about anything it's that it doesn't go on longer.
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Summary: A Touching Recollection...
Review: "Angela's Ashes" is a poignant, gripping story that reveals the the strife of poverty, but also shows us that humor and love can exist regardless of the circumstance; that all of us have the ability to look above our stations in life to what we want to be. This is a treasure of a book that touches the human spirit. Everyone should read it!
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Summary: great,great and great again!
Review: I would give this book more stars if I could! I can't remember the last time I enjoyed a book so much.This is one of the funniest books ever written,and at the same time one must remember it is a very tragic story.That's probably the reason for it's huge success and the reason for Frank Mc'Courts survival.There is no point in going over the plot of the book,I just want to say thanks to the author for giving us such a great book,a book which has achieved the status of a classic in four years! To the people of Limerick I want to salute.I have heard that many of them hated the book,and thought it humiliating to their town and history.I can't understand why.If anything,they are entitled to recognition for their suffering.Frank presented the whole world a piece of Irland's history.There was (and there still is)hunger and poverty in many places and countries.About some of them we don't know until someone like Frank Mc'Court comes along and tells us about it.To anyone that hasn't read it yet-run and buy the book and then save it for the next time you'll read it,I sure intend to read it again.And again.
Rating:
Summary: Ashes
Review: I remember it was only a few months ago that I was chatting online in an AOL book chat (Bookaccino at TBR) when everyone was constantly raving about this book. I felt left out of the conversations since I did not read the book. Now, I understand what everyone was raving about. Angela's Ashes touches the hearts of us all with the tales of his father's alcoholism and how his family struggled to survive. Who could not to relate to the story of a little boy trying to grow up and be a man? While reading this story I didn't know whether to laugh or cry. My favorite part of the book is when Frankie hears his first bit of Shakespeare; "I do believe, induced by potent circumstances, that thou art my enemy." It made me think of the first time I saw a real Shakespearean production of A Midsummer's Night Dream. I was awestruck by the beauty and majesty of the Shakespearean language. "It's like having jewels in my mouth when I say the words," McCourt writes. When reading this passage I was smiling thinking, "Wow, that's right!" While it is almost impossible to completely relate with a character in a book, it is equally impossible not to know somewhat what the character must be going through. I find that Frank's story is very emotional. Yet McCourt does not blame anyone in his memoir. In a way, he just seems to say, "Sure life was hard but life is life. What do you expect?" It is this attitude perhaps that makes the memoir more enjoyable to me. Whereas some writers might directly or indirectly use their memoirs to blame their problems on others, McCourt just tells his story.
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