'Tis: a Memoir: The sequel to Angela's Ashes - Softcover

McCourt, Frank

3.72

63,114 ratings by Goodreads

9780743200981: 'Tis: a Memoir: The sequel to Angela's Ashes

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0743200985 ISBN 13: 9780743200981

Publisher: Simon & Schuster, 2000

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"McCourt has created an unsparing portrait of a man, and a time, that's richer and more devastating than his earlier work. 'Tis is a better book than Angela's Ashes" (Esquire). Angela's Ashes, Frank McCourt's poignant memoir of his Irish childhood, left readers and critics alike wanting to hear more about this brilliant raconteur's incredible life. Picking up where that Pulitzer Prize winner left off, 'Tis begins in 1949--when nineteen-year-old Frank arrives in America with dreams of a better life--and tracks his journey from impoverished immigrant with rotten teeth, infected eyes, and no formal education to college-educated schoolteacher. It is a tale of survival as vivid, harrowing, and often hilarious as Angela's Ashes, for Frank had the same invincible spirit at nineteen that he had at eight and still has today.

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Review:

The sequel to Frank McCourt's memoir of his Irish Catholic boyhood, Angela's Ashes, picks up the story in October 1949 upon his arrival in America. Though he was born in New York, the family had returned to Ireland due to poor prospects in the United States. Now back on American soil, this awkward 19-year-old, with his "pimply face, sore eyes, and bad teeth," has little in common with the healthy, self-assured college students he sees on the subway and dreams of joining in the classroom. Initially, his American experience is as harrowing as his impoverished youth in Ireland, including two of the grimmest Christmases ever described in literature. McCourt views the U.S. through the same sharp eye and dark humour that distinguished his first memoir; race prejudice, casual cruelty and dead-end jobs weigh on his spirits as he searches for a way out. A glimpse of hope comes from the army, where he acquires some white-collar skills, and from New York University, which admits him without a high school diploma. But the journey toward his position teaching creative writing at Stuyvesant High School is neither quick nor easy. Fortunately, McCourt's openness to every variety of human emotion and longing remains exceptional; even the most damaged, difficult people he encounters are richly rendered individuals with whom the reader can't help but feel uncomfortable kinship. The magical prose, with its singing Irish cadences, brings grandeur and beauty to the most sorrowful events, including the final scene, in which Angela's ashes are scattered over a Limerick graveyard. --Wendy Smith

Review:

Peter Collier Los Angeles Times Book Review 'Tis has those elements that made Angela's Ashes such a success -- the narrative brio, the fierce sympathy for human tie and torment, the intuitive feel for character and above all the love of language.

Malcolm Jones Newsweek 'Tis is the story of a man finding two great vocations -- teaching and storytelling...a hard-nosed but lyrical conclusion to the story begun in Angela's Ashes.

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