Angela's Ashes: A Memoir (Scholastic Elt Readers Ser.)
Literature biography, Journals and memoirs, Biography
Synthetic audio, Automated braille
Summary
A Pulitzer Prize–winning, #1 New York Times bestseller, Angela&’s Ashes is Frank McCourt&’s masterful memoir of his childhood in Ireland—now with a new introduction by Patrick Radden Keefe. &“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 luminous memoir of Frank McCourt, born in Depression-era 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 Malachy—exasperating, irresponsible, and beguiling—does 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, near-starvation and the casual cruelty of relatives and neighbors—yet 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.