Grab Your Edition Angelas Ashes Engineered By Frank McCourt Accessible Via Document

memoir is both beautifully written but also incredibly depressing, I have yet to watch the film based on this book, but many of the anecdotes will be hard to forget.
“If you had the luck of the Irish
Youd be sorry and wish you was dead
If you had the luck of the Irish
Then youd wish you was English instead”

How can ONE book be so WONDERFUL and so HORRIBLE at the same time I have no idea.
But this book is both, Big time.

Its difficult to imagine anything worse than a childhood crushed under the oppressive conditions of abject poverty, relentless filth and unmitigated suffering.
The childhood described in this book is the worst Ive ever encountered, The “lucky” children suffer injuries or illnesses that due to poverty go untreated and result in death, The rest suffer miserable existences, Actually, “suffer” and “miserable” are not adequate to describe the experience, The children in “Angelas Ashes” would have traded their lives for a life of merely suffering a miserable childhood in a heartbeat.


And yet, somehow, Frank McCourt achieves a brilliant feat in this book, He tells a horrific story that caused me to cringe, grind my teeth, cry and loose sleep worrying.
This book affected me physically, It was beyond upsetting. But McCourt wrote it in a way that kept me reading, As depressing as it was I could not put it down, McCourts writing is mesmerizing.



Quite different from other memoirs I readespecially the brand of memoir that's been coming out in the last few yearsFrank McCourt's Angela's Ashes tells of the author's povertystricken childhood in Ireland in the earlyth century.
It's told from the first person present perspective, which doesn't allow for as much mature reflection, but it does create a very immediate amp immersive atmosphere.
And speaking of atmosphere, McCourt writes so descriptively and which such skill that you can really picture everything he's talking about.
It's incredibly well written, with a Joycean stream of consciousness that again contributes to the immersive quality of the story.
I'd recommend taking your time with this one, not only because it's depressive nature is a bit too much to bear in large quantities, but also because there's so much to savor and appreciate about McCourt's story and writing.
I see why this is a modern classic, Impressive read years ago already. Updating my library. I read his book, then I got to know him, and rarely will you find as similar a voice between the man and the writer as in this memoir.
A tragic gem of a childhood story, In Angela's Ashes, Frank McCourt paints a picture of a childhood mired in poverty, He manages to be humorous and heartbreaking, and hopeless and triumphant all at once, I laughed, I cried, I felt dearly for the disadvantaged McCourt family that struggled against all odds,

The memoir borrows heavily from the art of realism as tales of impoverished childhoods usually are.
McCourt was born in depression era Brooklyn to an alcoholic father who spent all his wages at the bar, and a mother disgraced and desperate to feed her starving children.
Here, we have a glimpse at the life of an Irish family living in a ratty but ethnically diverse tenement building.
The children were often left their own devices, while the adults struggled with adult problems keeping a home, putting food on the table, etc.
Loss is a prevalent and recurring theme in the book, Frankie's siblings, as young as several months, were victims of death many times,

Things don't improve when they move back to Ireland to start over, Their NorthIrish and alcoholic of a father couldn't find work, drank all the charity money they managed to get, and eventually abandoned his family for good.
Meanwhile, the rest of the family must overcompensate by stealing, begging, and applying for public assistance the shame of which deeply affect each member of the family.
Additionally, Frankie, a devout Catholic, must reconcile his church values and practices with stealing to feed his family, his sexual awakening, and the continuing deaths of his family and acquaintances.


All in all, fantastic depressionera sliceoflife of a poor Irish family, McCourt is soulful and has a way with weaving tales and building characters, He makes you laugh and cry with the family, and keeps you rooting for their survival, I was very engaged and was sorry it had to end a bit too abruptly too, I must say.
Five. What makes this book special and makes it evocative of the era, is not just the painful details of a povertystricken Irish Catholic childhood lived during World War II, but the beautiful voice of the young Frank McCourt.
The man, the writer of this book, the adult Frank McCourt, brings his youthful self alive in a way that brings the reader into direct contact with the author as a child.


The details of McCourts life and the things that young Frank notices evoke a certain era, and certain struggles that have been well documented both in fiction and nonfiction.
But no one produced a young Frank McCourt, This character, real and reanimated, leaps from the pages to join the readers household,

Like few other books Ive read, Angelas Ashes is a cure for loneliness, When you read this prizewinning memoir, youre not alone, but instead have young and humorous Frank standing over your shoulder telling you what mam says and what da says.
In this classically dysfunctional Irish Catholic family the parents advice rarely agrees leaving little Frankie to figure life out for himselfanother archetypal element from the Irish Catholic childhoods of a few generations ago.


This book transcends the genre, making it fully deserving of the attention and prizes lauded to it and its author.
But the worst offender of the last twenty years has to be the uniquely meretricious drivel that constitutes "Angela's Ashes".
Dishonest at every level, slimeball McCourt managed to parlay his mawkish maunderings to commercial success, presumably because the particular assortment of rainsodden cliches hawked in the book not only dovetails beautifully with the stereotypes lodged in the brain of every American of Irish descent, but also panders to the lummoxes collective need to feel superior because they have managed to transcend their primitive, bogsoaked origins, escaping the grinding poverty imagined in the book, to achieve what Spiritual fulfilment in the splitlevel comfort of a Long Island ranch home And Frankie the pimp misses not a beat, tailoring his mendacity to warp the portrayal of reality in just the way his audience likes.


No native Irish reader, myself included, has anything but the deepest contempt for this particular exercise in literary prostitution and the cynical weasel responsible for it.


my apologies to the fine people of Long Island, for the unnecessary vehemence of the implied slur in the above review: clearly it is not meant to be allencompassing Imbued on every page with Frank McCourt's 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 Depressionera Brooklyn to recent Irish immigrants and raised in the slums of Limerick, Ireland.
Frank's mother, Angela, has no money to feed the children since Frank's father, Malachy, rarely works, and when he does he drinks his wages.
Yet Malachyexasperating, irresponsible and beguilingdoes nurture in Frank an appetite for the one thing he can provide: a story.
Frank lives for his father's 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 Frank's survival, Wearing rags for diapers, begging a pig's head for Christmas dinner and gathering coal from the roadside to light a fire, Frank

endures poverty, nearstarvation and the casual cruelty of relatives and neighborsyet lives to tell his tale with eloquence, exuberance and remarkable forgiveness.


Angela's Ashes, imbued on every page with Frank McCourt's astounding humor and compassion, is a glorious book that bears all the marks of a classic.
The title of this book can also be "How to find humor and "excitement" in pain and poverty"

sad funny warm honest hope survival mustread

sitelinkFrank McCourts sitelinkAngela's Ashes is a very interesting and a different kind of memoir.
. . this will remain in your memory for a long time, Frank has written this book so well that most of the times, it feels like we are on this journey along with him.


This memoir will teach us to find humor and laughter, even during the toughest times of life.


"The master says it's a glorious thing to die for the Faith and Dad says it's a glorious thing to die for Ireland, and I wonder if there's anyone in the world who would like us to live.
" One of my favourite books of all time! It made me laugh, cry, get angry, . . without depressing me! Frank McCourt is a wonderful story teller! Picked this memoire to experience some more foreign countries through literature.
Good choice. What could have easily been another misery porn immense poverty, hunger, neverending unwanted pregnancies, drunkenness, strict religion, deaths of TB and pneumonia on every other page became something more because of the author's remarkable voice, filled with innocence, humor and almost unwavering optimism of childhood.
Amazing that McCourt managed to preserve this voice well into hiss, I had not planned on writing a proper review, so I began to read others', Quite a few unleashed verbal vitriol at McCourt's memoir, claiming that it is not entirely accurate and that it is too mawkish/maudlin/bathetic.
Others claim that the author romanticizes the penury and destitution of the lives in his lane,

First, no memoir can ever betruthful our memories are incomplete and sporadic at best, In fact, as I read I liked that there were NO quotation marks used to indicate speech, I actually thought that was a subtle way to indicate the author wholeheartedly admitting that it is impossible to accurately recall conversations from one's childhood.
The book does not have to represent a meticulously accurate picture of what Limerick was like at the time all it has to do, and all any memoir purports to do, is reveal what life in a particular place was like AS EXPERIENCED BY THE AUTHOR.
Plus, who cares about inaccuraciesa good story is a good story,

To say it is maudlin is extreme, There are many unfortunate events that take place however, not once did I get the sense that McCourt was trying to manipulate his readers' sympathies.
Events were described as a child would experience them, . . kind of like a Scout Finch as narrator, It is this fact that led some reviewers to claim that McCourt romanticized the rampant squalor and death.
That would be like saying To Kill a Mockingbird romanticizes racial prejudice,

Anyway, it was an absorbing read filled with personal tragedies and laced with humor, Definitely worth a read.


If I were not such a jackass in high school, perhaps I would have appreciated Frank McCourt speaking at my graduation and even read this ten years ago.
I wish I had. " Când tata vine acasă cu leafa din prima săptămână, mama e încântată că poate plăti datoria italianului drăguț de la băcănie și că poate ține iar capul sus, fiindcă nimic nu e mai rău pe lume decât să fii dator și obligat față de cineva.
Face curat în bucătărie, spală cănile și farfuriile, curăță masa de firimituri și de resturi de mâncare, golește răcitorul și comandă o nouă bucată de gheață de la alt italian.
"
" Trebuie să studiați și să învățați, spuse el, ca să vă faceți o părere proprie despre istorie și toate celelalte, dar ce părere să vă faceți dacă vă fluieră vântul prin minte.
Mobilațivă mintea, mobilațivă mintea, E casa voastră prețioasă și nimeni pe lumea asta nu se poate atinge de ea, Dacă ați câștiga la Loteria Irlandei și vați cumpăra o casă care are nevoie de mobilă, ați umpleo cu resturi și gunoaie".