Genealogy Books - Angela's Ashes

Spotlight customer reviews:
Customer Rating:

Summary: It was downhill after the first few pages...
Comment: After hearing so many positive things about the book and putting off reading it, I decided to read
it several years after its publication and subsequent movie release. Not having seen the movie yet,
I was particularly curious about the book.

I was miserable but nonetheless captivated
for the first third of the book. The details and imagery were very poignant even though the style
of prose (e.g. very little use of punctuation or dialogue indicators) was a bit difficult to get
used to. There were several moments when I was moved quite nearly to tears with sympathy. />
However, shortly thereafter, I began to get weary of the story and noticed that it did not
seem to be going anywhere. Furthermore, the older he got, the more I found myself disliking the
narrator. By the end, his endless ramblings about masturbation marathons and worse finally
convinced me that I may finish the book but I certainly wasn't going to like it.

I
would not recommend this book.

Customer Rating:

Summary: What a great book
Comment: I'm not an avid reader, and it takes a truly great work to keep me interested. This book made me
laugh out loud and other times almost cry. What a difficult life this young man had growing up with
a deadbeat father who drank the family into the squalor of poverty. Even more moving was his
determination to break the cycle of his father, mother, relatives and seek a new beginning in a
different world. Experiencing the story through the eyes of young Frankie was refreshing.
Maintaining hope through all of situations that he was forced into was quite an eye-opener for me.

Customer Rating:

Summary: Shining a Light
Comment: Let's be honest. Only a minute percentage of people can say that we have experienced abject poverty
in Limerick, Ireland, so it is necessary for someone such as Frank McCourt to shine a light on his
personal childhood. McCourt leads us his childhood through his memoir, Angela's Ashes. The reader
is a witness of McCourt's childhood in many respects. The majority of McCourt's memoir is told in
the present tense, so it is more like a novel and McCourt is just a character in the story. McCourt
tells his story as if it is happening right then and he is writing down his thoughts at the time.
He is often part of the dialogue. When Frank delivers a telegram to Mrs. Finucane, their
conversation goes:
How old are you, by?
Fifteen and a half, Mrs. Finucane. /> Young enough to make a fool of yourself
and ould enough to know better. Are you
shmart,
by? Are you anyway intelligent?
I can read and write, Mrs. Finucane
(331).

Since McCourt takes the reader inside the story, it is easier for the reader
to relate to and sympathize with McCourt and try to understand the struggles he went through as a
child.
However, the reader does not always sympathize with Frank McCourt because there are a
few times throughout the book in which there is an extreme lack of ethos. One of these times was on
the first page of the book. McCourt writes "[P]eople everywhere brag and whimper about the woes of
their early years, but nothing can compare with the Irish version: the poverty; the shiftless
loquacious alcoholic father; the pious defeated mother moaning by the fire; pompous priests;
bullying school masters; the English and the horrible tings they did to us for eight hundred years"
(11). Although there is ethos throughout the rest of the book with the exception of a few slip-ups,
it was impossible to forget that first part of the book where McCourt trivializes everyone else's
problems and says that his problems are the worst and are the only ones that anyone can complain
about. As a reader, one might think, "[I]f he doesn't care about our problems, why should we care
about his?"
McCourt puts forth a story that is miserable and even frightening at times, but
should not have said that his story is more important than everyone else's. In a way, it makes the
reader feel detached from McCourt's story that is so well written in general.

/>

Customer Rating:

Summary: Effectively Uncovering the Harsh Realities of Living in Poverty
Comment: In Frank McCourt's memoir, Angela's Ashes, McCourt reveals the struggles of living through the
Depression in Ireland. With an alcoholic father and a mother who was disgraced for marrying an Irish
man from the North, Frank McCourt fights to live and earn enough money to go to America. McCourt's
style of writing and his willingness to admit stealing make this memoir a unique heart-wrenching
story.

Throughout the memoir McCourt interjects song lyrics into his writings. The song
lyrics give life and imagery to the scenes. Frank and his family do not know where their father is
until they hear him "rolling along Windmill Street, singing, When all around a gigil keep, the
West's asleep, the West's asleep..." (77). This description allows the reader to picture a drunk
father stumbling through the dark streets of Ireland while his family waits for him, desiring to eat
and go to sleep.

When Frank's mother becomes a beggar his schoolmates chant, "Frankie
McCourt, beggar woman's boy, scabby-eyed, dancing, blubber-gob, Jap" (250). These lyrics explain the
tormenting Frankie receives from his schoolmates and the impact of a boy living in poverty. />
In order to survive while living in poverty, McCourt reveals the crimes he committed as a
child and creates a strong ethos. When Frank's family has no food and his mom is moaning for
lemonade, he decides to "stick the bread up under my jersey with the lemonade and promise to tell
everything in confession" (236). When his family is in need of coal, Frank believes he and his
brothers can "climb over the walls and take what we want" (239). McCourt's honesty and confession of
stealing gives Frank a strong ethos and enables the reader to imagine Frank's fight to stay alive.

Thankfully Frank McCourt was able to survive through the Depression in Ireland, or
else we would be without this great memoir. McCourt's memoir effectively uncovers the harsh
realities of living in poverty.

Customer Rating:

Summary: Weaving Tales of Childhood
Comment: This is one of the most spellbinding tales of childhood ever told, so much so that it even won a
Pulitzer Prize. "Angela's Ashes" tells the story of the McCourt family's life in Ireland, a
hard-scrabble life of extreme poverty that reads more like a novel than the true story of someone's
life. Yet, despite such unbelievable circumstances (and McCourt chronicles them all: the harshness
of the church, discrimination based on an impoverished life, deprivation of even the bare
necessities of life, a home so shoddy the upstairs is declared "Italy" because it is warmer and
drier than the rest of the house), this is an amazing, even uplifting tale.

McCourt
tells of a life without shoes, of a father whose hope leaves when he cannot feed his family and
instead turns to drink, and of First Communion and all the joys that might accompany any small bit
of good fortune. Even more memorable is the approach McCourt takes: direct, revealing all the flaws
and all the magic of childhood. He never sugarcoats anything, never makes any bitter judgments. He
merely tells the events as he remembers them. And that makes this book a sincere, lovely story for
all.

Back to Angela's Ashes

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