Angela'S Ashes

mbued on every page with Frank McCourts astounding humor
and compassion. This is a glorious book that bears all the
marks of a classic. 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 Pulitzer
Prize winning memoir of Frank McCourt born in
Depression-era Brooklyn to recent Irish immigrants and
raised in the slums of Limerick Ireland. Franks mother
Angela has no money to feed the children since Franks
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 fathers
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 Franks survival. Wearing rags
for diapers begging a pigs 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. Angelas
Ashes imbued on every page with Frank McCourts astounding
humor and compassion is a glorious book that bears all the
marks of a classic.