ANGELA'S ASHES (EE)(安吉拉的骨灰)|报价￥56.00|图书,进口原版,Biographies & Memoirs 传记,Historical 历史,
品牌：
基本信息
·出版社：Scribner
·页码：464 页码
·出版日：1997年
·ISBN：0684843137
·条码：9780684843131
·版次：1997-04-01
·装帧：平装
·开本：32开 32开
内容简介
Book Description
"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.
Imbued with Frank McCourt's astounding humor and compassion -- and movingly read in his own voice -- Angela's Ashes is a glorious audiobook that bears all the marks of a classic.
Amazon.com
"Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood," writes Frank McCourt in Angela's Ashes. "Worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood." Welcome, then, to the pinnacle of the miserable Irish Catholic childhood. Born in Brooklyn in 1930 to recent Irish immigrants Malachy and Angela McCourt, Frank grew up in Limerick after his parents returned to Ireland because of poor prospects in America. It turns out that prospects weren't so great back in the old country either--not with Malachy for a father. A chronically unemployed and nearly unemployable alcoholic, he appears to be the model on which many of our more insulting cliches about drunken Irish manhood are based. Mix in abject poverty and frequent death and illness and you have all the makings of a truly difficult early life. Fortunately, in McCourt's able hands it also has all the makings for a compelling memoir.
FromSchool Library Journal
YA. Despite impoverishing his family because of his alcoholism, McCourt's father passed on to his son a gift for superb storytelling. He told him about the great Irish heroes, the old days in Ireland, the people in their Limerick neighborhood, and the world beyond their shores. McCourt writes in the voice of the child?with no self-pity or review of events?and just retells the tales. He recounts his desperately poor early years, living on public assistance and losing three siblings, but manages to make the book funny and uplifting. Stories of trying on his parents' false teeth and his adventures as a post-office delivery boy will have readers laughing out loud. Young people will recognize the truth in these compelling tales; the emotions expressed; the descriptions of teachers, relatives, neighbors; and the casual cruelty adults show toward children. Readers will enjoy the humor and the music in the language. A vivid, wonderfully readable memoir.
Patricia Noonan, Prince William Public Library, VA
FromLibrary Journal
McCourt is the eldest of eight children born to Angela Sheehan and Malachy McCourt in the 1920s. The McCourts began their family in poverty in Brooklyn, yet when Angela slipped into depression after the death of her only daughter (four of eight children survived), the family reversed the tide of emigration and returned to Ireland, living on public assistance in Limerick. McCourt's story is laced with the pain of extreme poverty, aggravated by an alcoholic father who abandoned the family during World War II. Given the burdens of grief and starvation, it's a tribute to his skill that he can serve the reader a tale of love, some sadness, but at least as much laughter as the McCourts' "Yankee" children knew growing up in the streets of Limerick. His story, almost impossible to put down, may well become a classic. A wonderful book; strongly recommended for readers of any age.
-Robert Moore, DuPont Merck Pharmaceuticals, Framingham, Mass.
FromBooklist
It is a wonder that McCourt survived his childhood in the slums of Depression-era Limerick, Ireland: three of his siblings did not, dying of minor illnesses complicated by near starvation. Even more astonishing is how generous of spirit he became and remains. His family lived--barely--in a flat so miserable that every year they had to cram themselves into an upstairs room when winter floods made the place only half-habitable. That upstairs room was "Italy" --warm and dry. Downstairs was Ireland--wet and cold. Father sat up there drinking tea, while mother Angela often could not rise from bed, so depressed was she. Or mother sat by the fire, waiting for father to return; when he did, frequently drunk on their little money, he would line up the boys and extract promises that they would die for Ireland. Dying was what everyone seemed to do best: the little sister, the twins, the girl with whom Frank first had sex, the old man Frank read to, too many boys from school, too many neighbors, too many relatives. McCourt spares us no details: the stench of the one toilet shared by an entire street, the insults of the charity officers, the maurauding rats, the street fights, the infected eyes, the fleas in the mattress . . . Yet he found a way to love in that miserable Limerick, and it is love one remembers as the dominant flavor in this Irish stew. Many a lesser book gets the kind of publicity push that McCourt's memoir is happily slated to receive. Expect demand, not only from those seduced by blurbs and interviews, but from word-of-mouth thereafter.
Patricia Monaghan
FromAudioFile
You could paper the walls of an Irish castle with the accolades bestowed upon Angela's Ashes. First, the print version won the Pulitzer Prize. Then Frank McCourt himself narrated the abridged version (celebrated in AudioFile, April/May 1997). But the best was yet to come--the entire book read and sung and recited by author McCourt. Here we have the stereotypical Irish characters--the drunken poet father; the all-suffering mother; the miserable, hungry kids being turned away by a haughty Church--all made three-dimensional and brought fully to life by both McCourt's language and his loving, intimate narration. "It happened," this voice attests, "I was there." Grim it is--but the tale and its teller transcend the poverty--and so does the listener, who glories in the story and voice from beginning to end. Happily, Mc-Court is at work on a sequel. We eagerly await his next turn at the mike. We eagerly await his next turn at the mike. Winner of AUDIOFILE's Earphones Award.. A four-tape abridgment also read by Frank McCourt is available. E.K.D.
From Kirkus Reviews
A powerful, exquisitely written debut, a recollection of the author's miserable childhood in the slums of Limerick, Ireland, during the Depression and WW II. McCourt was born in Brooklyn in 1930 but returned to Ireland with his family at the age of four. He describes, not without humor, scenes of hunger, illness, filth, and deprivation that would have given Dickens pause. His ``shiftless loquacious alcoholic father,'' Malachy, rarely worked; when he did he usually drank his wages, leaving his wife, Angela, to beg from local churches and charity organizations. McCourt remembers his little sister dying in his mother's arms. Then Oliver, one of the twins, got sick and died. McCourt himself nearly died of typhoid fever when he was ten. As awful and neglectful as his father could be, there were also heartrendingly tender moments: Unable to pay for a doctor and fearful of losing yet another child when the youngest is almost suffocating from a cold, his father places ``his mouth on the little nose . . . sucking the bad stuff out of Michael's head.'' Malachy fled to do war work in England but failed to send any money home, leaving his wife and children, already living in squalor, to further fend for themselves. They stole and begged and tore wood from the walls to burn in the stove. Forced to move in with an abusive cousin, McCourt became aware that the man and his mother were having ``the excitement'' up there in their grubby loft. After taking a beating from the man, McCourt ran away to stay with an uncle and spent his teens alternating between petty crime and odd jobs. Eventually he made his way, once again, to America. An extraordinary work in every way. McCourt magically retrieves love, dignity, and humor from a childhood of hunger, loss, and pain. (First serial to the New Yorker; Book-of-the-Month Club and Quality Paperback Book Club alternate selections; author tour)
Download Description
"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.
Book Dimension
length: (cm)17.1 width:(cm)15
作者简介
Frank McCourt was a writing teacher at Stuyvesant High School in Manhattan for many years and performed with his brother Malachy in A Couple of Blaguards, a musical review about their Irish youth. He lives in New York City.
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Customer Reviews
1.Mesmerizing, July 11, 2000
By Krista (Maryland, USA)
Frank McCourt piles on so many examples of the overwhelming poverty he experienced during his childhood that I almost put down the book in despair after reading just forty pages. I'm glad that I didn't.
Despite the misery of his childhood, McCourt's memoir includes a number of lively and humorous vignettes. Two of my favorites are his the account of his attempts at Irish dancing, and the hilarious description of Frank's ill-fated first Communion.
Nevertheless, McCourt does not mask his anger at the institutions that failed him and his dyfunctional family. School teachers (with one exception) were uninspiring, church people shut the door in his face or expected the poor to grovel for handouts, government officials lacked empathy.
McCourt doesn't fall into the trap of over-generalization, though. Most people, despite their flaws, have their redeeming qualities in McCourt's account. Most notably, his hard-drinking, criminally irresponsible father also told beautiful stories, regaling Frank with tales of Irish heroes. No hero himself, McCourt's father passed his gift for telling an enthralling story to his son.
2. Powerful & Provocative Portrait Of An Irish Boyhood!, November 24, 2000
By Barron Laycock "Labradorman" (Temple, New Hampshire United States)
As someone who spent the majority of his formative childhood living within the realms of a struggling blue-collar Irish-American Catholic neighborhood housing project, much of the atmosphere and flavor so memorably and powerfully described in this best-selling memoir seems like familiar territory, from the hard-drinking and somewhat remote and indifferent fathers to the sainted mothers, from the raucous black humor to the spasms of terrible drama and tragedy, often visited on helplessly impoverished children. Yet Frank McCourt manages to display a unusually colorful and quite unique descriptive power to the florid retelling of this life lived under conditions of extreme privation and misery, a life which he largely describes in terms so dismal, dark and devoid of hope that it is remarkable to witness the degree of grace, resilience, and good humor that he so often brings to bear. It is this most prominent feature of his creative writing that gives such a powerful testimony to his ability as a writer.
Like James Joyce's personal glimpses into Irish lives in his classic series of short stories, "The Dubliners", McCourt evokes the suffocating and smarmy atmosphere of flagrant poverty, to the point that I often found the story difficult to read. Thus, regardless of how well he illustrates the ways in which he and his family struggled to overcome the circumstances, it was, for me at least, often difficult reading. For any of us who have actually lived under such circumstances of privation, these powerfully drawn recollections can be challenging and painful to recall. And while I would never suggest that my own experiences approach the extremes of want and squalor described herein, I took a long time to finally work my way into the portions of the book where the McCourt brothers finally triumph based on their American citizenry. While the tone of the memoir is sometimes downbeat and sullen, the progress of these two young pilgrims toward a life of greater promise is one that gains ballast as we progress toward the end.
The memoir is, as one has come to expect, full of the usual Irish complaints, from the egregious and often outrageous alcoholism of the father and Irish men in general to the full McCourt treatment regarding the so-called Irish troubles and the unmitigated perfidy of the dreaded English. Having heard all this throughout my fifty years, it finally becomes tiresome, boring and irrelevant to hear all the highly polished and crudely embellished litanies again and again here. We who are either Irish or of Irish ancestry must learn to live with what we have, to do the best we can to make the most of what we find our existential circumstances may be, and I for one would hope that the reading of books like this, books which faithfully chronicle the consequences of all the particulars of traditional Irish working class culture, would act to mollify the most extreme of these conditions and save the next generation of young Irish men and women from its manifest dysfunctions.
3.Beautiful Memoir....Left Me Wanting More, September 28, 2006
By L. Shirley "Laurie's Boomer Views" (fountain valley, ca United States)
You know how sometimes a book is just so good, when you see you are nearing the end, you want to slow down and savor those last few pages?
Angela's Ashes" by Frank McCourt,was that for me.It is a wonderfully beautiful memoir and an engrossing story. McCourt tells the story of his life as a boy, growing up dirt poor in Ireland. And he tells it in a way that makes it impossible to stop reading. I always had a hard time finding a point to stop turning the pages, I had to know what would happen to Frankie McCourt.
The writing is incredibly honest. It flows from sentence to sentence, paragraph to paragraph,page to page. McCourt puts himself right back into the mind of his younger self, and seems to be talking and thinking just as he would from ages 4 through a young man. He speaks of his family. His father that couldn't keep his wages in his pocket on pay day, and could not make it home without stopping for a pint(or two) along the way. Yet a man who seemed to understand his young sons, and always had what seemed sage advice and a great love for his children. His mother's suffering, with the loss of children dyeing, trying to make do for her family by begging, and did whatever it took to keep her children warm and fed. He writes quite honestly, about his schooling, his relatives,the many illnesses he and the family went through, his taking to petty thefts to keep from starving, discovering his sexuality, the jobs he had to do, and his great desire to go back to America, where he was born.
The stories are sad, and will tug at your heartstrings, but the humor he uses in describing the sometimes dehumanizing events(having to empty and clean disgusting chamber pots among them) make this a stand out read instead of a woe-is-me theme.The characters jump off the page, you can hear them speak with their thick Irish accents, or in some cases New York. He writes of all the doors that were closed in his face, when he needed help, but you can feel the tenacity with which he continued to move his life forward. There are many laugh out loud moments of little Frankie's adventures, and other times you may need to have the Kleenex handy.One thing for sure, you'll be thinking of Little Frankie McCourt for a long time after the read. Through thick and thin(mostly thin) this was a family rich with love. A love that is contagious.
I am very much looking forward to reading the next books, "Tis" and "Teacher Man", the "sequels".Thanks Mr. McCourt, for a wonderful time, spent with you and your family in Ireland.
Enjoy the Read....Laurie
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