Posted on 07/20/2009 9:18:39 AM PDT by Albion Wilde
Frank McCourt, a former New York City schoolteacher who turned his miserable childhood in Limerick, Ireland, into a phenomenally popular, Pulitzer Prize-winning memoir, Angela’s Ashes, died in Manhattan on Sunday.....
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
I’m of Irish extraction and I see him as just being an ungrateful, whiny liberal. I enjoyed the book but I questioned why his parents’ families did not help them. The Irish that I know believed that charity begins at home.
Yes, I read all 5 as well. Frank's books were head and shoulders above Malachy's, which were amusing but much more egocentric. Angela's Ashes was a literary classic.
The most vehement anti-Catholics tend to be former Catholics. Its a faith that arouses strong passions both positive AND negative. Remember the old saying that in Italy, everyone follows the Church: one half with a candle, the other half with a club.
“It was the Great Depression. Just about everyone was hungry.”
Indeed, my mother, born in 1923 in south Georgia, spent most of her childhood hungry. She attributes her thin legs and arms to malnourshment as a child. However, McCourt’s childhood was horrifying, much worse than my mother’s. McCourt was a good writer, and “Angela’s Ashes” is well worth reading.
The ones I know that immigrated to this country over the past 30 years are flaming lefties, even if they are still churchgoers.
His brother has a bit of the malarkey in him. The actorbr
Richard Harris grew up down the street from them. He stated
that they didn’t have it as bad as depicted in the book.
Supposedly,McCourt changed the book from a memoir to a
rememberance.
My daughter went to Trinity College. The whole country is made up of leftists. I’ve had some of her schoolmates visiting here and all they did was knock America.
If 3 of your siblings die from diseases associated with malnutrition, I’d think he had it pretty bad. The other families, if I recall correctly, had dad’s that worked at least part of the time and would send money home via bicycle courier. McCourts dad drank all their money.
I stood in line after one of his university lectures attended by perhaps 650 people, and he autographed well into the night. During his talk he had railed a bit against the entrenched Catholic hierarchy of his home town and what he felt was callous and demeaning treatment of the poor. Naturally, his comments were generalized outward by many critics and his countrymen (and I'm sure they will be on this thread as well) to an all-fronts assault on Catholicism per se, but I didn't read them that way; his writing was very precise. He resented the indignities visited on his mother when she tried to get help from the local parish, but he also simply but movingly described a priest who heard his confession (he stole food) as an adolescent and simply forgave him.
In the moment when I came up to him in line, I had marked some pages and pointed out to him that he had redeemed himself with the Catholic Church by writing of the priests who were kind to him. What a surprised look he gave me!
Didn’t catch that in the article - but I did skim it rather quickly. (I’m at work, after all.) :-)
Yes, a public university in New York City, after he emigrated alone to America and had served in the U.S. military during Korea. I think many Americans cannot imagine the poverty Irish Catholics in poor parts of Ireland experienced, right up until about 20 years ago when the European Union started pumping development money into the Republic of Ireland. His childhood was comparble to the desperation we heard of in the U.S. in the Appalachians during the Depression.
great find. Thank you for posting. I knew Frank and am saddened by his death. Yet having read this short article, I feel I missed out tremendously by his flat drawn character-his mother Angela. I will give him a pass however as it was his first book. Frank was a man that loved to talk and talk he did with everyone. He may have loved talking more than writing. He loved being around people and having an audience. May he rest in peace.
It’s in his book.
An 8th grade education in a Catholic school in Ireland at that time would be equal to an Associate’s Degree today from a Community College here.
Here is the final passage of the article to which you linked, which rings true:
For finally, it is possible that the Angela of Angela's Ashes and [the] Mrs. McCourt [that I knew] are one and the same person, nothing fictive about her - simply a new woman once she got Frank out of the house. Indeed, my children's clearest memory of Mrs. McCourt is seeing the formidable woman wreathed in a cloud of cigarette smoke. The ashes are nonfiction - or so it seems.
Have you read the book? Your comments seem to indicate that you have not. If you have not, would you mind reading it before arguing? Or are you Irish yourself? In which case, arguing is as natural as breathing in and breathing out....
That’s one thing I never did understand, his mothers affinity for “fags” (cigarettes). I know it was a stressful life and that would help but if you’re that poor and your children are that hungry, seems like there are priorities and “fags” aren’t one.
There once was an author from limerick...
When my family were traveling in Ireland a few years ago, my grown son and I stopped into the lobby of a tiny hotel in the town of Kells to ask for directions. We were set upon by the owner, who lectured me angrily and at great length about George Bush. My son and I were rolling our eyes. What were we supposed to do with her comments? We are a couple of private citizens in a country of 300 million people -- almost 10 times as many as in Ireland.
When she paused for an instant to take a breath, I said, "As soon as I return home, I'll be sure to get over to the White House and tell him how you feel."
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