Angela's Ashes [Abridged, Audiobook] [Audio CD]

Frank McCourt (Author, Reader)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 10, 2009

"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 rags for diapers, 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.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

"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. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From School 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
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Audio CD
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster Audio; Abridged edition (March 10, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0743581490
• ISBN-13: 978-0743581493
• Product Dimensions: 5.9 x 5.1 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1,575 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #842,334 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Frank McCourt (1930-2009) was born in Brooklyn, New York, to Irish immigrant parents, grew up in Limerick, Ireland, and returned to America in 1949. For thirty years he taught in New York City high schools. His first book, "Angela's Ashes," won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award and the L.A. Times Book Award. In 2006, he won the prestigious Ellis Island Family Heritage Award for Exemplary Service in the Field of the Arts and the United Federation of Teachers John Dewey Award for Excellence in Education.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

80 of 83 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Hope Inspiring, September 20, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Angela's Ashes: A Memoir (Paperback)

Angela's Ashes is a book so filled with remorse and sadness, it's amazing that the reader somehow finds themself completely and joyfully satisfied. The novel revolves around the penniless childhood of Frank McCourt and begins in America with four-year-old Frank and his three year-old brother Malachy, who bears the same name as his father, and the infant twins, Eugene and Oliver, and the memories of the baby Margaret, "already dead and gone." Your heart goes out to the poor family, blessed with a loving mother, Angela, and yet cursed with a father who means well, but is constantly drunk or yearning for the "pint," as they call it. Early in his life, McCourt's family moves to Ireland, with help from his aunts and grandmother. Unfortunately, money is not easily found in Ireland either, and the McCourt family migrates from home to home, barely surviving on the few shillings Malachy McCourt doesn't spend at the local pub. The McCourts experience tragedy upon tragedy. His physical romance with a young lady named Theresa Carmody sick with consumption, his unfortunate habit to "interfere with himself," and the sad moment when in a drunken stupor on his first pint he strikes his own mother causes Frank to fear he is doomed to an eternity in hell. Unbelievably, despite all of the terrible things that happen in Frank's childhood, there are moments described in the book that give the reader a complete sense of joy and hope. I immensely enjoyed this memoir and would recommend it to any reader. I was especially enamored of the style of writing in which Frank McCourt chose to write. The words seemed as if they gently tumbled directly out of the mouth of the seven-year-old Frankie, or mischievously flew from Frank as an thirteen-year-old "working man." This novel was exquisitely written and is a jewel to read, as well as a treasure to remember.

27 of 27 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars PHEW!, November 30, 1999

By 

Gary Ragaglia (Boston, MA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Angela's Ashes: A Memoir (Paperback)

What a ride! You'll laugh, cry, exhilarate, and despair-all on the same page. Trapped in a childhood of extreme poverty in Limerick, Ireland, Frank McCourt not only survives but thoroughly conquers. In the depths of even this much misery, however, there are small mercies and kindnesses and they are not lost on him. This is what gives the book it's humanity-the ability to withstand horrific circumstances through humor, determination, and forgiveness-and triumph with soul intact. And the people! They seem more alive in ink than most of us seem in flesh.

28 of 29 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Angela's Ashes, October 17, 2000

By 

Danielle (Milwaukee, WI USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Angela's Ashes: A Memoir (Paperback)

This has to be one of the best books I've read in a LONG time. It was refreshing to find a book that could keep my wandering mind and High School attention span in check. The trials of the Mc Court family were nothing to laugh at but I often found myself trying very hard to surppres laughter while reading in a classroom where you could easily hear a pin drop. The humerous sections were not based around the events that were taking place, but more around how Frank, as a child, viewed what was going on. The McCourt children knew very little of life and death. What they did know was taught to them by their drunken father and manic depressive mother. Frank seemed to have a slight grasp on the idea that once his younger siblings died he would never see them again, yet he still had many innocent questions. At a very young age Frank was questioning how death happened. He saw a dog get hit by a car and bleed to death. Later on he made another child bleed on the playground. Thinking that blood was death after seeing the dog die from it, Frank feared that he had killed his friend when in all actuality it was a minor injury. Later on in the novel when others take ill and die Frank questions why there was no blood and yet they died. The lack of knowledge and simple questions that Frank had as a child added a great deal to the novel. It was almost depressing when I realized that he would never get those questions answered and just keep wondering. While reading I found myself often forgetting that this was a true story and wondering how an author could come up with a plot line with this many twists and turns. All in all I LOVED this book. It earned each and every one of the five stars not only because it kept my attention for longer than humanly possibly, but because of the way McCourt took tragic events and somehow made the reader believe that for a split second something comical was going on.