Purchase
A Memoir
Scribner
June 1999
On Sale: May 25, 1999
368 pages
ISBN: 068484267X
EAN: 9780684842677
Paperback (reprint)
Add to Wish List
Non-Fiction Memoir
"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 does nurture in Frank an appetite for the one thing he can provide: a story. Perhaps it is a story that accounts for Frank's survival. Wearing shoes repaired with tires, begging a pig's head for Christmas dinner, and searching the pubs for his father, 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.
 Media BuzzCBS Sunday Morning - March 15, 2015
Diane Rehm Show - NPR - March 21, 2012
Late Late Show - February 24, 2010
CBS Sunday Morning - December 27, 2009
Studio 360 - July 25, 2009
NewsHour with Jim Lehrer - July 20, 2009
| 
© 2003-2026