Rating: 
Summary: Miserable childhood - eloquent writer
Review: If the extreme poverty endured by Frank McCourt was responsible for producing such a gifted writer, then perhaps a few current best-selling authors should have grown up in Limerick, Ireland, wearing tires for shoe soles and being forced to vacate the bottom floor of their apartment during the winter due to the flooded conditions therein.The most striking thing about "Angela's Ashes", besides the lyrical prose, is the pervasive tones of forgiveness and love. Nowhere are these more evident than in the passages describing little Frankie McCourt having to hunt through all the pubs on his street to find his father, who is somewhere drinking away 5 pounds sent to the family in honor of a new baby. The reader is impressed by the lack of bitterness in the grown Frank McCourt; he simply tells what happened with warmth and humor and compassion. Whether the reader is laughing at the author's frank, hilarious descriptions of his own sexual awakening, or shaking his or her head over the passages describing the deaths of his two brothers and only sister, they will, as they close the book, wonder immediately when the sequel will be available.
Rating:
Summary: SHOCKING AND VERY MEMORABLE BOOK
Review: Right from the begining, from the first word I felt the power of the story. It is captivating and shocking at the same time. Did I know all that before? I guess I did. Did I care? I guess I did not. And now I feel as I was shaken by a very powerful hand and my eyes have opened. Ireland and the Irish blaim the British for all their troubles but they should blaim religion for that first. Poverty, ignorance, alcoholism and the general misery should be all attributed to religion. This book is quite well composed and it transferres you to the real depth of the human tragedy. Hunger, death, the numness... Men say a lot of promising words but they cannot keep the jobs even if they have one. Catholics, Protestants... What the difference? One drinks his wages away and another one take care of the family... Is that the difference? This book raised so many questions in my head. Yes, I think we all should read it. This is an important book.
Rating:
Summary: Couldn't put it down...
Review: Everything I'd like to say has already been said by everyone else, but I just wanted to say I could NOT put this book down. This book also made me cry..and I never cry when I read a book. I cried for three days at least, because a mother's pain translates universally and I was just imagining what if this was my family, and all this stuff was happening to my children? Read this autobiography..you won't be disappointed.
Rating:
Summary: A child's memoir
Review: "When I looked back on my childhood I wonder how I survived it 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."
It is almost impossible to ignore the strong imagery and personal experiences that Francis McCourt shares in Angela's Ashes. The story's subject matter concerns a world of poverty that few readers have experienced, yet they are invited to share McCourt's thoughts and feelings while growing up in Ireland. It is a memoir that is potent, funny, sad, and yet dignifying. In an interview, McCourt says "Even though we were poor, at the lowest level, even below the lowest economic level, we were always excited. It was rich in the sense that we had a lot to look up to, to look forward to, to aspire to, a lot to dream about. But in economic circumstances it was desperate."
Frank McCourt is the oldest of seven children - three of whom die at an early age. Born in New York City in 1931, the book follows his family's move to Limerick, Ireland when he is three years old. Ireland at this time is immersed in poverty, made only worse in McCourt's case by an alcoholic father who cannot hold a job and drinks away all of the money received from the dole. From age three to nineteen, when he leaves for America, McCourt endures a struggle with Protestants, the English presence in Ireland, strict Catholic school masters, bullying classmates, and the sickness and death associated with poverty.
Although the events he lives through are dismal, the impact of the book is not disheartening. It is a memoir written from a child's perspective, which creates a more personal feeling when reading the book. McCourt tells you everything he is thinking in a child's words. He describes the experiences the way he felt them when he was a child. This creates a jovial yet heavy sadness to the book.
Angela's Ashes is a fantastic book that gives an insight into what it would be like to live in poverty, and how a person could prevail over it. McCourt survived his childhood through a combination of virtue, hope, luck, and humor. He faced his obstacles with a child's innocence and conveys this through his perceptive writing. He won both the Pulitzer Prize for Biography and the National Book Critics Circle Award. When finished with the book, the reader is grateful to McCourt for sharing the qualities he learned growing up and inspiring those same qualities in us.
Rating:
Summary: Masterful Memoir
Review: With Angela's Ashes, Frank McCourt joins the ranks of other talented writers like Mary Karr revolutionizing the way memoirs are written. Blending rich descriptions of the Irish childhood with personal insights into his own life, McCourt masterfully lures the reader along a path through his life leaving tears and laughter in his wake. What not only makes the book, despite its often horrific subject, readable but also a literary masterpiece is McCourt's ability to subtly insert good and happiness in small anecdotes amid the ruin that was the majority of his childhood. An example occurs midway through the book in a description of one of McCourt's neighbors. The boy is hunchbacked and deformed and has therefore decided he wants to be a radio announcer so that he can affect people and sound normal without being seen. Just after this beautiful idea is presented, McCourt relates how in order to raise money, the boy sold tickets to other boys allowing them to watch his sisters bathe. Startling and yet poignant, to me this anecdote is a summary of the book. A young boy trying to find hope in the dismal world that was Ireland.
Rating:
Summary: Survival
Review: This book tells the story of the childhood of Frank McCourt. McCourt was just an ordinary boy, born in New York City of Irish immigrant parents. After a family tragedy, his parents returned to Ireland with the children. And that's how this little kid from New York City ended up growing up in a lane in an Irish slum, learning essential survival skills like how to keep his belly full and his feet dry. It seemed that everything that could go wrong did- -Frank's father was a drunk who couldn't bring home a paycheck for more than a few weeks running, the house where they lived was flooded each spring from the lane's common privy, and educational opportunities were quite limited for boys without funds. In such circumstances, the only way to survive is not to fret about tomorrow or what the neighbors might think, but to go ever forward with determined independence. As I listened to this story as read by the author, I kept hearing my own grandfather's voice. Yes, I'd heard all the stories about childhood deprivation and inner strength, about drunken fathers and run-down houses, but I'd never really listened when my grandfather told them. "He's exaggerating," I thought, "Nobody ever lived like that." But after hearing the details of Frank's childhood, I realize that my grandfather wasn't complaining about his childhood or looking for sympathy. He was just trying to paint a picture of the experiences that he lived through, which were so very different from my own. There was something about my grandfather's style of speaking that made him sound different from everyone else I knew. He was born in the US so he didn't have an Irish accent at all, but there was something peculiar about the rhythm of his speech and the style of relating to others that I never noticed in other people's voices. As McCourt narrates conversations between his parents and aunts and uncles, I can hear my grandfather jumping into the fray, a bit drunk, but not so drunk that he couldn't come out with a witty remark that still leaves people laughing when they remember it forty years later. I understand now- -my grandfather was simply Irish. This book is a wonderful telling of childhood with all its ups and downs, honesty and deceit, grief and joy. McCourt's writing draws the reader into Frank's world, where they can hear his father singing in the pub and smell the bread and onions frying on the stove.
Rating:
Summary: An unforgettable masterpiece
Review: This was, to my recollection, the first book I've ever read where the minute I was finished with it, I wanted to start reading it all over again. I didn't want to let little Frankie McCout go, I guess. This memoir of poverty, alcoholism, disease and death would be compelling in the hands of any decent writer, but in the hands of the sublimely talented Mr. McCourt, it is a masterpiece. That he can write so touchingly, forgivingly, and hilariously of his miserable boyhood without a trace of self-pity is astonishing. What I liked most was how he was able to get into the head of the boy he was from ages 3-19 and relate exactly how it felt at each stage. It's almost as if he wrote this memoir right as he was living it -- the persepective was that seamless and true. I could talk about the book's lyricism and beauty and strength of spirit, but it comes down to this: he brought these characters alive for me. And I will never forget the one-word final chapter that brought me to tears. One word! How does he do it? Long live Mr. McCourt, a new shining star among many fine Irish writers. I hope we have not heard the last of him.
Rating:
Summary: One of the best books I read.
Review: This is the kind of book that you devour so much it is interesting. The words aren't enough to describe such a beautiful story and writing. It is extremely sad but it makes your life like the one of a king afterwards. You won't be able to complaint. It's strong and the only thing to do after you read this wonder, is to grab Tys, the sequel. Also very interesting...
Rating:
Summary: Touched For Life
Review: I haven't read a better book and may never. It's not a put-down book. Your eyes won't want to stray from a single word. It's something you'll want to read over and over again. Frank's life is truly something you can't help but to drop your jaw at. It's filled with every emotion only each amplified. Without a big booming ending it made it's success in the mind haunting, beautiful details. It will make you take a trip to Ireland and pretend you're Frank McCourt in Limerick again. I'm glad he shared his life with us.
Rating:
Summary: Unbelievably splendid memoir!
Review: The events that occured in Frank's childhood life is just unfathomable that it makes me cry every time I read Angela's Ashes. I imagine myself living his life of immense poverty and suffering and I know I'll never be able to go through what he has gone through in his childhood life. Frank writes with such uniqueness and passion about his childhood that not one single soul who reads his memoir will be left dry-eyed. This book deserves 10 stars instead of 5!!!
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