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'TIS

A MEMOIR

Those whose hearts went out to the little boy who suffered so in Limerick might be put off by the hard-drinking, carousing...

            While not as tightly structured as his Pulitzer Prize-winning Angela’s Ashes (1996), the irrepressible McCourt’s follow-up memoir has the same driving rhythm, charm, and infectious humor that so captivated readers of the earlier installment.

            The story picks up in 1949 as McCourt, aged 19, sails to America to seek his fortune.  Befriended by a priest who helps him settle in New York City, he’s shocked when the man makes a drunken pass at him.  His life in New York becomes one of seedy boarding houses, menial labor on the docks and warehouses, and, always, heavy drinking, often with his brothers Malachy and Michael.  Conditionally admitted to New York University (he had no high school diploma), he’s thrilled to show off his textbooks on the subway but bored with the class work.  He’d rather read Sean O’Casey, “the first Irish writer I ever read who writes about rags, dirt, hunger, babies dying….”  He falls in love with and eventually marries Alberta “Mike” Small, a beautiful Episcopalian from New England.  It’s a marriage that will “become a sustained squabble.”  His early years as a high school teacher, first at a vocational school on Staten Island, later at the prestigious Stuyvesant High School, are humorously and revealingly retold.  His first words as a teacher?  “Stop throwing sandwiches.”  McCourt occasionally interrupts his chronological narrative with lengthy, if funny, portraits of characters he’s met along the way.  Angela, who has moved back to New York to be near her sons, has become a difficult, sickly woman upon whose death McCourt would write:  “I thought I’d know the grief of the grown man…. I didn’t know I’d feel like a child cheated.” 

            Those whose hearts went out to the little boy who suffered so in Limerick might be put off by the hard-drinking, carousing grownup.  But there’s no denying McCourt’s engaging wit.  Is it as rewarding as Angela’s Ashes?  ‘Tis.  (First serial to the New Yorker; Literary Guild main selection; author tour)

Pub Date: Sept. 21, 1999

ISBN: 0-684-84878-3

Page Count: 368

Publisher: Scribner

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1999

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NIGHT

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...

Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children. 

He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006

ISBN: 0374500010

Page Count: 120

Publisher: Hill & Wang

Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006

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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

Well-told and admonitory.

Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.

Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.

Well-told and admonitory.

Pub Date: June 1, 2006

ISBN: 0-06-074486-3

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006

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