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. 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.
