Frank McCourt's Pulitzer Prize-Winning Memoir 'Angela's Ashes': A Heartbreaking Tale of Childhood Poverty and Survival

Rubbish: No issues.

United Kingdom on Oct 19, 2023

Fearless: Among the best memoirs ever written.
Classic.

India on Sep 07, 2023

Cliente Amazon: El libro llevaba tiempo en querer leerlo, me ha encantado porque se lee fácilmente y el autor cuenta una serie de anécdotas de su vida en la Irlanda pobre, a pesar de las penurias tienen tintes cómicos.

Spain on Jul 24, 2023

Amazon Customer: An excellent book, well written.
Although in virtually new condition, some lady plastered a large label with her name on it to the first page.
Obviously a returned item.

Canada on Mar 22, 2023

André C.: Amazing, powerful message, very inspiring.

Brazil on Mar 09, 2019

Cynthia Sally Haggard: I don’t think anyone would describe Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes, his account of growing up poor and starving in Ireland, as funny. Nevertheless, the many tragedies in his story are leavened by glimpses of humor. Near the beginning of his memoir, McCourt sets the scene in the following way:

Out in the Atlantic Ocean great sheets of rain gathered to drift slowly up the River Shannon and settle forever in Limerick. The rain dampened the city from the Feast of Circumcision to New Year’s Eve. It created a cacophony of hacking coughs, bronchial rattles, asthmatic wheezes, consumptive croaks. It turned noses into fountains, lungs into bacterial sponges…

The rain drove us into the church–our refuge, our strength, our only dry place. At Mass, Benediction, novenas, we huddled in great damp clumps, dozing through priest drone, while steam rose again from our clothes to mingle with the sweetness of incense, flower and candles.

Limerick gained a reputation for piety, but we knew it was only the rain. (1-2)

We learn that it rains in LimerickLimerick, but Limerick is not just wet, it stays wet for eternity. The great sheets of rain drift slowly up the...

United States on Oct 07, 2014

Fyrecurl: The best book I've read this year. If Neil Simon were to have written a novel it may have well looked like this book. A unique voice and style applying humor in all of the right ways for a reader to absorb the sad tragedy of growing up poor, Irish, and Catholic during the depression years, in America, and Ireland. Frank McCourt is able to overcome the pathos of his poignant, sad, and often disturbing memoir of growing up as the oldest son of a poor Irish Catholic family, through use of voice. In Angela’s Ashes, Frank McCourt presents his memoir though the limited first person view of a young boy. He creates comic relief in using the voice of a small child, as he grows up, first in New York, and then in Limerick, Ireland, during the time of the depression, and its aftermath. McCourt presents a tragic account of his family that would generally overwhelm any reader, unless presented through the eyes of a child, who often does not realize the hardship he has undergone, and whose innocent, limited view allows him (and the reader) to keep going. McCourt pushes the reader through the grief of near starvation, the upbringing by an alcoholic father, misguided mother, loss of younger...

United States on Apr 18, 2013