Frank McCourt Books

Got this book as part of a 4 for 3 offer and couldn't be more pleased. Hardcover book, with large, beautiful, sometimes breathtaking pictures of Ireland. I am planning a trip to Ireland this summer and reading up on the folklore and myths will certainly come in handy for my travels. Great offer, everyone should buy this one.

Apenas recibi este libro hace unos dias, y hasta ahora lo he disfrutado mucho. No es tan crudo como "Las cenizas de Angela", y conserva la manera tan particilar en la que McCourt narra sus historias. Es un alivio saber que la situacion del autor no es tan apremiante como en su obra anterior. No lo he terminado de leer todavia, pero es un libro que estoy disfrutando mucho. Mas adelante, cuando termine de leerlo, actualizare mi opinion sobre este, pero por ahora puedo recomendarlo con toda seguridad. **************
01/27/07
Ok. Al terminar de leerlo puedo decir con seguridad que el libro ha cubierto todas mis expectativas. Definitivamente ha sido una lectua muy placentera.

Well, of course he is; in fact, has been for some 60+ years now. But that's not the point. The point is, or at least seems to be, that "Yeats Is Dead!" is the unpublished last work of the doyen of Irish literature himself, James Joyce. Or is it? Or are the 600 pages of undecipherable scribble that are at the center of this book's wild ride really the chemical formula for a new anti-ageing skin cream? Or something else entirely? In short, what is the point of the chase; or put differently: Is there any point at all?

"Yeats Is Dead!" is the literary version of a midrange relay race; or of that party game in which a story is built one word or one sentence at a time, added in turns by each of the participants, often with hilarious results, particularly if the players abandon the idea of creating a story that actually makes sense and take off in whatever direction their fancy takes them. Here, the participants are fifteen Irish writers of varying calibers with a very well-developed sense of humor, who each get to add one chapter to the story, and the results are hilarious indeed. Bodies fall like flies, allusions to Joyce abound, and Irish clichés are jiggled by the dozen, from "O Danny Boy" (here: in a Rasta version) to bars serving whiskey and very strangely named drinks indeed, and accents from working class Dublin to Limerick and beyond. (And can there possibly be a more Irish-sounding name than Grainne O'Kelly?) Even one of Ireland's football - i.e., soccer - heroes, ex-midfielder turned sports journalist Eamon Dunphy (yes, that one) gets his fair share of shots from the authors' collective hips.

The book follows the example of the two short story collections "Finbar's Hotel" and "Lady's Night at Finbar's Hotel," likewise collaborative efforts by some of modern Ireland's best-known authors. Unlike those two collections, however, "Yeats Is Dead!" discloses the authors of the individual chapters; and unlike them, it also pretends not to contain several loosely-connected short stories but one continuous, novel-length storyline - for whatever that's worth, though, given the book's general premise and the differing styles and approaches of its writers. Contributors include acclaimed writers Roddy Doyle, Frank McCourt, Hugo Hamilton, Gene Kerrigan, Anthony Cronin and Joseph O'Connor (who also served as the book's editor), playwrights Conor McPherson and Gerard Stembridge, comedian Owen O'Neill, sports writer Tom Humphries, and others. Roddy Doyle gets to deliver the opening salvo, which is of course a hard act to follow - personally, I would rather have seen him write the final chapter; and I would also have loved to see a contribution from the editor (and co-contributor) of "Finbar's Hotel," Dermot Bolger. But from the murder by heart attack which starts it all to the surviving cast members' final conclave in (where else?) a bar in County Limerick, this is one great frolicking literary tour de force. It's not great literature; nor does it pretend to be ... just fifteen Irish writers poking fun at themselves, their country and the mystery genre, and they had me laughing out loud a lot in the process. Definitely. O yes.

Also recommended:
Finbar's Hotel: A Novel
The Barrytown Trilogy

July 1999.

That summer was blistering hot and full of anticipation. Waiting for my beautiful son to arrive into our arms from Korea.

I had just finished up working full time in a children's Day Treatment program. I wanted the summer to "nest"...

to prepare for my son's arrival.

I spent the past two years of my social work career, day after day, listening to the stories of children.

Suffering.

And when permitted the children would allow me to enter their world and join them on their healing journey.

This work provided the daily miracles that can so easily be missed in any other setting.

Kids laugh, they pull pranks, they love to open gifts, they are still just kids in spite of the worst that humanity can toss at them.

Not even three weeks out from this counseling job, I picked up Angela's Ashes.

I don't know why... I just did.

In Frank McCourt's book, I found comfort. I found that optimism grows like a lotus flower out of the mud. I found the voice of an angel in the poverty stricken dirty streets of Limerick. I found the voices of all those kids who spilled their secrets behind my closed office door... lightening their load while I tried my best to make their world better... one kid at a time.

Frank McCourt is a ruddy angel with an acerbic wit and a gift for seeing things as they truly are.

I love ruddy angels.

This is a book that needs to be on everyone's to read list.

Yes, it is that good.

McCourt's child protagonist and his over-riding optimism, his natural-born inclination to make the best of things, makes an otherwise grim tale not only bearable but uplifting and heroic. Despite the daily, brutal grind of poverty, this child still manages to experience, wallow in, simple joys. Due to McCourt's honest voice, I felt every one of this kid's untidy, conflicted emotions. I LOVED this kid.

But after reading some of the criticism here, I think some people forget that this is first and foremost a MEMOIR. Memoirs are subjective by nature. So if McCourt's personal experience shows prejudice toward the Catholic Church, or if he seems to present a "stereotype" of the drunken, morose, Irish----that's HIS viewpoint----naturally. If you want a more balanced view don't read memoirs! Read academia! (It's like reading an autobiography of a politician and complaining that it's too political).

I would absolutely recommend this book to anyone who loves to read. The naysayers included. It's not a pretty story, but it IS heroic.

Definitely one of the best written books I have ever read. The stunning simplicity and humor he used to depict the heart-wrenching account of his childhood is just truly brilliant. This book would have you crying and laughing. I love it and would highly recommend it. I think its a masterpiece and a MUST read!

Theres a reason someone decided this was good enough to be a movie. Frank McCourt has an amazing voice on paper. Highly recommended for the "ponderers" of our generation. Please read his others-Well worth it!

The basic problem with it is that while McCourt's life of poverty in Ireland is interesting and there are a couple of dozen well written passages and anecdotes, the work is atrociously edited. All the more galling for the lack of good editing is that this was McCourt's first book- he needed the help. The book is about 450 pages long and the 1st 300 pages deal with his first 6 or so years of growing up. We get the same images of infant death, Irish blarney, drunken dad, suffering mom, stalwart Frankie, and colorful Eriniana. The problem is that early childhood is necessarily the least interesting part of a life because a) the percentage of real memories per year is very low and b) the remembered is rarely cogitated upon enough to produce any coherent thesis of its import or meaning to a life.

At describing these things McCourt is excellent. The scene of him and his brother getting bananas from a vendor in Brooklyn and his mom thinking he stole them is excellent, BUT such only works its charms once. After about 50 pages we get the idea already: McCourt's early life was bleak- it's as if he wants us to really, really know he suffered. The opening page or so at first read seems to poke fun at the Irish habit of bemoaning their woes, but it quickly becomes apparent that McCourt intended no irony in its felicitous prose. He truly wants the reader to know the Irish suffering is on par with that of Jews, blacks, and American Indians. By going on for 300 pages with this the reader starts to turn off about a third of the way though, then skimming between the Godotvian feeling anecdotes of misery.

Things only pick up when Frank reaches his teens- he gets various employment, has a falling out with his mom and her lover, rues his dad's departure, loses his virginity to a consumptive girl who dies, then heads off for America. There are many moving images and wonderfully non-stereotyped characters. The scenes with his tubercular lover are priceless, yet their whole affair is accorded a mere couple of pages vis-à-vis the dozens allotted the repetitious sufferings. A good editor would have told McCourt he had an intriguing 1st draft, but told him to cut the early years down to 100 pages, and double the teen tales to 300 pages. That 400 page edition of AA would have deserved all the acclaim the canonical edition has, while also being over 10% leaner.

This is the main reason why the film version of the book is actually better than the written version. That said, it's far from a great film, but it more judiciously accords the interesting portions of McCourt's life, with about ½ the film on the early years, and the rest on the teen years. As a writer I've often said that the poor practices of editors, publishers, and critics have had a disproportionately deleterious effect on contemporary literature. A bad editor either does not realize a gem that falls in their lap, passes on it, or butchers it, or they get a diamond in the rough, like AA, but have not the sense nor insight to demand the necessary revisions. Toni Morrison has made a career out of having her ill-edited novels published. Yes, she's gotten acclaim, but once dead her trip to the canon will be fruitless because the poor editing of her work will become ok to speak of. But, McCourt was not Morrison- he was a first time author- his editor should have done a better job.

talking to a friend the other day she said tell me one book you really enjoyed, the story and the story teller's talent for writing. this was the first book that came to mind. READ IT. it is amazing where the writer got to in life with this start. goes to show what a mother can do, without money and alot of love. and that if you are talented you'll get there no matter what.

I rate this book 4 stars, or 4 out of five, for the four out of five parts of the book that I liked. The first 4/5's of the book are wonderful. McCourt writes so honestly and with so much humor that you can't help liking his family even if the family dynamics are hopelessly flawed. I learned a wealth of information about the Irish as well and, though my own ancestors came from Ireland in the 1870's, I felt as if I was learning about their lives, though McCourt's memoir covers a much later period. As far as the 1/5th of the book that I didn't care for, I'm referring to the last part of the book which could be aptly titled: "Masturbation is My Life." I found the authors repeated descriptions of his youthful obsession with masturbating (how, where, when) to be tiresome.

This is an extraordinary book which takes place during nineteen years in the life of young Frankie McCourt. To those reviewers who say it's a sad and depressing tale, I say that they are surely missing McCourt's wry Irish humor. Yes, Frankie's young life was beset with poverty and tragedies galore, yet Frank McCourt manages to rise above his miserable impoverished childhood and still see the hope and humor in those terrible situations.

To those reviewers who say that the book casts a bad light on the Irish, I say that the only bad light that's cast is on fathers who drink and are absent, and more power to McCourt for saying what needs to be said about the boozers who make a misery of their family's lives, no matter what nationality they may be...and on the Church and the wealthy who would look down on the poor and make them feel humiliated.

To those reviewers who say the prose was hard to read, I say rent yourself a week's worth of good Irish movies: My Left Foot, The Secret of Roan Inish, The Commitments, Agnes Brown, Borstal Boy, The Crying Game, Da, & War of the Buttons and then give the book another read and you'll see that McCourt has written it true to the dialect and character of the Irish.

To those reviewers who say shame on McCourt for capitalizing on his poverty and making a buck, I say who better to turn things around and make some money off of his own misery, struggles and experiences, and why not? More power to him for growing up to be a writer and telling his tale.

This book won a Pulitzer Prize, and McCourt surely deserved it. The story is compelling, even if much of it is one train wreck after another. His characters are colorful and three dimensional, and through all the misery and poverty and hard luck in this boy's life, there still shines a beacon of love and hope. I'm sure that it might be difficult for young people today to relate to that level of poverty, but the story itself is universal. If not for McCourt's Irish dialect, it might be taking place in Russia or Poland or Italy or New York during the Depression.

Well done, Mr. McCourt, and thank you for a week's worth of gratifying reading.

- C.A.Wulff, author of Born Without a Tail

"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."
This bleak passage begins Angela's Ashes, a starkly realistic account of a young boy growing up in poverty, in the slums of Ireland. McCourt does a wonderful job of making you feel what he does, be it remorse, shame, sadness, excitement, amusement, or pure joy. It is a wonder he survived his rough childhood; three of the eight children in his family were carried off by sickness and lack of decent living conditions. His family scraped by in a miserable shelter in a neighborhood so poor that there was only one latrine for the entire street, and when winter comes the latrine floods, making their downstairs rooms uninhabitable. McCourt himself was nearly killed by typhoid fever, and later develops an eye infection that caused him to lose one of the few joys of his life: his job, for it makes him feel like a man. He definitely is more of a man to the family than his father, who is unemployed for most of the book, and when he manages to pick up a job, drinks away the pay and is fired for failing to show up for work, failing the family over and over again until he disappears to England, abandoning them.
This book is written from a child's eyes, and this aspect is accented by the lack of punctuation. McCourt experiences daily disappointments, and rare occasions of happiness, as his family struggles to survive in the poorest parts of Ireland, discriminated against because of their backgrounds and odd accents, and living off the dole. It is a true account of life in Ireland, not at all sugar-coated. Angela's Ashes is a stirring, gripping memoir of life in an impoverished home.

Frank McCourt has a way with words! His memoir of growing up poor in Ireland, with a drunk for a father and lazy, shiftless mother is written without malice. He and his brothers are left to their own devices to keep themselves fed, warm and clothed when Frank, the oldest is not even four years old. They live in a house where the main floor floods every year and they have to wade through the sewage to live in the remaining room upstairs until the water recedes. They grow so cold that they resort to tearing the walls apart for firewood. And yet his mother needs her cigarettes and his father needs his drink.

Frank's tenacity and humor in the midst of such misery is his salvation. And it is what makes this memoir so poignant. His own parents and grandparents, neighbors and the Catholic church leave Frank and his brothers to their own devices for survival. And they survive! And go to America. And it's a true story.

This is a collection of subtle stories of childhood in which Catholicism is an influence but not always necessarily the dominant one. Sewell has struck a nice balance between established, famous authors and a handful of emerging ones--whose work is among the best in the book. Recommended whether you remember your Catholic childhood fondly or not.

Anyone who has ever sinned or wondered about the nature of religious feeling should read this book. It is funny and heartbreaking by turns, and amid all these memories we see how children interpret ideas of spirituality passed down to them. They may not always understand, but their experiences are illuminating.

"A collection for Catholics, former Catholics, and Catholics by association, "Resurrecting Grace" is redolent with the images, sounds, smells, and deep heart experiences that are so much a part of a Catholic upbringing . . . . It is an encounter with this complex community of faith that sustains and exasperates those who have been touched by it." (from the jacket cover) These personal recollections are from some of our finest contemporary writers: Frank McCourt, Tobias Wolff, Anna Quindlen, Michael Patrick Macdonald, Brian Doyle, Sandra Cisneros, Rosemary Bray, and Patricia Hampl, among others. The collection contains pieces from writers of various races and ethnicities, and the reader is led to see the One True Church in all its colors and forms, all of its follies, and all of its profundities. The volume is rich with humor, but takes no cheap shots. These writers have reflected deeply upon their early religious experience: they have written to learn what they did not know, and they have grown deeper roots in the process.

Considering the calibre of the writers from whom Marilyn Sewell requested memories, the low quality of both the writing and "storytelling" in this book is abysmal. Most of the memories had little substance, and the tone of many essays was so poor that I had the impression the authors had scribbled them on cocktail napkins in a rush.

With few exceptions (Thomas Merton's section, for example), the recollections were boring and lacked any sort of bite. Neither humorous, nostalgic, nor thought-provoking, the tales would leave one constantly turning the pages, hoping some substance would follow. The quest for the Holy Grail would be less futile than that for any wit or charm in this book.

The promise of the title undoubtedly would prompt people to order this book as a gift for a Catholic friend or a hope of memories for oneself. I strongly suggest that potential readers at least take a glimpse at a copy on a library shelf first.

If Up The Down Staircase or To Sir With Love didn't cure you of wanting to teach, then this book might finish the job. McCourt (of Angela's Ashes) writes of his years as a high school English teacher in NYC. He own insecurities and inexperience plus the behavior problems of the teens show teaching as an often hopeless and certainly a thankless task.
The book never achieves the intimacy and grit that elevate Angela's Ashes to a stunning memoir. It follows McCourt through his efforts to learn classroom skills, stabilize his marriage, and to further his career with 2 years at Trinity College. Mostly it is less than compelling, possibly due to his own ambivilence about his efforts and his lack of goals.
Eventually he falls into a school situation where the students are motivated and his own teaching techniques, although offbeat, are validated.
Some of the vignettes of his students might make good fodder for a Chicken Soup of the Student's Soul, but otherwise they serve mostly as fillers.
Despite these criticisms, I'm ranking it a four star read due to McCourt's way with words and his willingness to allow us inside his life.

McCourties of the world rejoice! You have nothing to lose but your tears of woe anticipating when he'd return with his next book; the foremost memoirist of our time is back. Frank McCourt's "Teacher Man" is a spellbinding lyrical ode to the craft of teaching. It is a rollicking, delightful trek across nearly thirty years in New York City public school classrooms that will surely please his devout legion of fans, and perhaps win some new admirers too. Truly, without question, it is a splendid concluding volume in his trilogy of memoirs that began in spectacular fashion with "Angela's Ashes". Indeed, we find much of the same plain, yet rather poetic, prose and rich dark humor that defines his first book, along with his undiminished, seemingly timeless, skill as a mesmerizing raconteur. Is McCourt truly now one of the great writers of our time if he isn't already, with the publication of "Teacher Man"? I will say only that he was a marvellous teacher (I still feel lucky to have been a prize-winning student of his.), and that this new memoir truly captures the spirit of what it was like to be a student in his classroom.

"Teacher Man" opens with a hilarious Prologue that would seem quite self-serving if written by someone other than Frank McCourt, in which he reviews his star-struck existence in the nine years since the original publication of "Angela's Ashes". In Part I (It's a Long Road to Pedagogy) he dwells on the eight years he spent at McKee Vocational High School in Staten Island. It starts, promisingly enough, with him on the verge of ending his teaching career, just as it begins in the lawless Wild West frontier of a McKee classroom (I was nearly in stitches laughing out loud, after learning why he was nearly fired on two consecutive days, no less.). Frank manages to break every rule learned in his Education courses at New York University, but he succeeds in motivating his students, raising the craft of excuse note writing to a high literary art. He finds time too to fall in love with his first wife, Alberta Small, and then earn a M. A. degree in English from Brooklyn College.

Part II (Donkey on a Thistle) has the funniest tale; an unbelievable odyssey to a Times Square movie theater with Frank as chaperone to an unruly tribe of thirty Seward Park High School girls. But before we get there, we're treated to a spellbinding account of his all too brief time as an adjunct lecturer of English at Brooklyn's New York Community College, and of another short stint at Fashion Industries High School, where he receives a surprising, and poignant, reminder from his past. Soon Frank will forsake high school teaching, sail off to Dublin, and enroll in a doctoral program at Trinity College, in pursuit of a thesis on Irish-American literature. But, that too fails, and with Alberta pregnant, he accepts an offer to become a substitute teacher at prestigious Stuyvesant High School (The nation's oldest high school devoted to the sciences and mathematics; its alumni now include four Nobel Prize laureates in chemistry, medicine and economics; for more information please look at my ABOUT ME section, or at history at www.stuy.edu or famous alumni at en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuyvesant_High_School or Notables at www.ourstrongband.org.).

Surprisingly, Part III (Coming Alive in Room 205) is the shortest section of "Teacher Man". After having spent fifteen years teaching at Stuyvesant High School, you'd think that this would be this memoir's longest section, replete with many tales rich in mirth (Room 205, located a few doors from the principal's office, was Frank's room throughout his years teaching full-time at Stuyvesant High School.). Indeed I'm surprised that it is so brief. Yet there is still ample fodder for Frank's lyrical prose to dwell on, most notably a hilarious episode on cookbooks and how he taught his creative writing class to write recipes for them. He describes with equal doses of hilarity and eloquence, his unique style of teaching at Stuyvesant, which he compares and contrasts with math teachers Philip Fisher and Edward Marcantonio - the dark and good sides of Stuyvesant mathematics education in the 1970s and 1980s (I was a student of both and will let the reader decide who was my teacher while I was a student in Frank's creative writing class.) - but he still implies that his students were having the most fun.

Will "Teacher Man" earn the same critical acclaim bestowed upon "Angela's Ashes"? Who knows? Is it deserving of it? I think the answer is a resounding yes. Regardless, Frank's many devout fans - his flock of McCourties - will cherish this book as yet another inspirational tale from the foremost memoirist of our time (EDITORIAL NOTE: Reposted from my review of the original hardcover edition.)

After numerous attempts to contactthe seller, Istill have not received the book. Connie spahr 10/13/2008

I loved Angela's Ashes and was thrilled to learn there was a sequel. I was very disappointed in Tis, however. McCourt's writing style was charming in Angela's Ashes since he was writing from the perspective of a child but didn't translate well once he was recalling his adulthood. The book is way too long and there are many random, uninteresting anecdotes. I won't be reading McCourt's 3rd book.

Frank McCourt once again takes us on a tour of his life, this time from the age of nineteen to his fifties. As with Angela's Ashes, his storytelling is quintessentially Irish, and the reader can almost hear his brogue as he tells his tale. Again, this book is full of Irish humor and sensibility, but is much darker than its prequel, Angela's Ashes. I fully expected to love this book as much as Angela's Ashes, but I had a difficult time coming to terms with the way Frank McCourt presents himself as well as his mother this time around.

Certainly, Mr. McCourt is not in this world to live up to my expectations, but I was so disappointed to learn that he had let alcohol grab hold of him even after describing how his drunken father had made his childhood and his mother's life such a misery. There's no real explanation of how he became an author - his writing is treated as an aside to everything else going on in his life, is seldom mentioned and is never discussed in detail. On the other hand, his teaching career is discussed vividly, but is a sad treatise on American education and I came away feeling as though it was a job he despised.

At long last, there is a reference to the title of his childhood memoir, something that I expected in that book but never materialized. The titles of the two books might have been better off swapped.

C.A.Wulff - author of Born Without a Tail www.yelodoggie.com

Oh my word. I don't know what most reviewers are talking about. Tis is a true gift to readers who're interested in the author's life. Angela's Ashes had more poetry while Tis has more modern day cynicism being caged to a life imposes. In transparent words, this is the book where McCourt grows up in the USA. It's about his odd and awkward days of longing for women and wondering why he was the odd one out, about days when he wanted to be disconnected from his family and despite not being poor, the author finds himself in another predicament of missing Limerick, Ireland.

Frank McCourt is my favourite author. I don't know about writing styles because I've never read many books but Tis truly broke my heart a few times and it made me laugh out loud atleast six times. In my opinion, it is a bit criminal to say that this book is better than Angela's Ashes but I must admit I enjoyed reading this even more.

Do me a favour and ignore all the negative reviews. Arm chair critics wouldn't know better.

I thought Tis was a better read than Angela's Ashes. Being an American born in 1970, I can not relate to Ireland circa 1925 (it was apparently an awful place - move on). However, I found McCourt's historical accounts of WWII America to be fascinating reading. Americans were so openly racist back then toward every group imaginable. If anyone can claim a reason for America's greatness, it's her ability to change for the better, although Iraq is a bad example. But then again, GW Bush actually lost those two elections, so we tried. I suppose there will always be material for books, like Tis, about ugly Americans who despite themselves turn out to have functioning hearts. A sincere thank you, Frank.

After surviving a miserable childhood in Ireland and making his way to New York City as a young man, Frank McCourt shares anecdotes about his next 30 years -- teaching high school and community college English classes.

McCourt's somewhat unconventional teaching style, he readily admits, didn't reach everyone or even succeed as often as he would have liked. Yet many of his classes, filled with students from poverty-stricken and hopeless homes, found real enthusiasm and understanding through such lessons as writing excuse notes for their own teachers, for setting recipes to music, and setting up impromptu ethnic feasts in the park.

As no section of any person's life can possibly be extricated from all others, readers will find some familiar tidbits first mentioned in AA and 'Tis. This is, in my opinion, just light enough to establish familiarity with previous material; it is certainly not a recycling of the first two books.

As always, McCourt is honest and humorous, giving readers a glimpse into the world that was and is uniquely his.

Hey everyone! I just wanted to let you know there is a GREAT event coming up almost a week away in New York City. The American Place Theatre's Festival: Literature to Life is performing a theatrical adaptation of TEACHER MAN by Frank McCourt on September 21st, 2008. Don't miss out on this wonderful opportunity to see this moving piece of literature come to life. Here's the information and can't wait to see you there!

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I don't believe there can be much more to be said about the Charms of Frank McCourt. Even when he is divulging his shortcomings, his wit and bare-knuckled honesty draw you in.

"Teacher Man" is, to me, quite different than his previous two works, but completely enjoyable down to the last tale. I think it makes a great gift to every teacher who has ever struggled with their profession and the demise of their idealistic vision. It stands out as a shining beacon that you don't have to be "perfect" to make a life changing difference in the lives of a student.

A fellow teacher and friend recommended this book to me; I had never heard of it previously, surprisingly. I knew I would like it just by looking at the cover and first few pages: Frank McCourt's sense of humor and finesse with teaching really shows through with two photographs there especially. He takes the reader easily through the span of his teaching career with a string of hilarious anecdotes and shares invaluable, yet typical, insight along the way. McCourt really refreshed my sense of what teaching was, is , and can be along with putting teaching situations and education in perspective. As a teacher of high school Language Arts, I often wonder whether or not it's me, the kids, or both. Whether he intends to or not, McCourt reassures educators like me that educating youth is an ongoing, if not sometimes stifling, doubting, and frustrating struggle. Kids have always been kids, so to speak, and the best teachers have always been just that too. A true reality check for public school systems in a time of No Child Left Behind. It does a stunning and long-lasting job of reminding us that making kids think is what we yearn for and that, sometimes, we realize that yearning, in spite of ourselves. Thanks Mr. McCourt for revitalizing a part of me that had been a bit bogged down!

I am puzzled by this book. The first paragraph stated McCourt's pride over having made something of himself after a terrible childhood. He then proceeds to tell the story of his teaching as part of this. He admits himself that he felt like a fraud much of the time. I can see why! Most of the anecdotes cover stories of his childhood and he admits to not having control over the students. (He seems to waver between intense pride and self loathing.) Although I enjoyed many of his anecdotes(the assignments to write a suicide note, a excuse note to God from Eve, and reading recipes to music), I spent a lot of time wondering how he could have been a wonderful teacher and had kids flocking to the classroom. I must assume that there is something key to McCourt's charming classroom manner that he left out.

This is a fun book that talks about life in small-city Utah in the 1910s and 1920s. This author has a very warm, flowing style that adds a lot of fun life and nostalgia for the time when he could easily wander the streets as a harmless hooligan. There were a lot of implicit rules that boys of that era followed, and Douglas Thayer spells out those rules in a way that makes you feel as though you were really there. Although life was hard growing up, he didn't really notice because of the freedom and safety that his era allowed.

Hooligan: A Mormon Boyhood is the memoir of author Douglas Thayer, a.k.a. "Mormon Hemingway", who grew up in Utah Valley during the Great Depression and World War II. Brimming with nostalgia for an era when life was simpler, and boyhood was filled with mysteries, delights, and dreams, Hooligan is a cheerful tale of adventure and surprisingly ingenious pastimes. "The best material for a hand grenade was the dust from a vacuum cleaner, wrapped in toilet paper and tied with a string. The idea was to hit the enemy on the head so the hand grenade exploded and blinded him temporarily. This was hard, but it could be done. The effect was well worth the effort." Recommended for a pleasant and leisurely stroll down memory lane.

Childhood is rich with feelings and with things; ideas come later. The "hooligan" of Doug Thayer's memoir has few ideas, most of them gleaned from adults and skewed because who can understand grown-ups anyway? ("Stark naked" is worse than "buck naked," but why?) The feelings and the everyday things are his own, however, and given to us with a richness and a clarity readers will treasure.

It's all here--from the chores a boy must finish before he can burst out into the day, to the underwater wonder of swimming (buck naked) with the fish he can emulate if not yet catch. Comparisons to Twain's Tom Sawyer are inevitable and appropriate; in addition, I keep thinking of Thornton Wilder's Our Town and The Happy Journey--simple narratives that include "nothing less than everything": family life, food, work, nature, the stars, sickness and health, death and faith, sexuality, mystery, war--and all of it offered up in immediate, boy-sized images. (The hand-made slingshot, the ice pan beneath the ice box that required more tending than a young puppy, the indignities of the doctor's examination.)

This book is a gem: months after reading it, you will remember some detail with such fondness and clarity you'll think it was a memory of your own. To make a work both universal and unique is the epitome of art, and with this book, Douglas Thayer has achieved just that.

I enjoy memoirs, so I wanted to like this book. The title was intriguing. "Hooligan" made me think of the McCourt lads, and some boys I knew in my childhood--the ones our parents used as Bad Examples, because they were always in some kind of minor trouble that pre-disposed them to entanglement in the bigger and more dangerous kinds. "A Mormon Boyhood" suggested I would learn things about growing up Mormon in Utah that would be different from growing up Methodist in Pennsylvania. Not only did the book fail to live up to its title, it failed almost completely as a memoir. Yes, it is full of recollections, in general terms, of boyhood in Provo, Utah, in the years just before World War II. But most of these recollections, far from being in any sense personal, enlightening or unique, could have come from the memory of my brother, whose boyhood was spent at the other end of the country, 3 decades later.

Hooligan is not a story, in any sense, and it lacks a main character. This memoir's biggest failing, for me, is the total absence of the author as a person. I didn't know who Douglas Thayer was when I began reading, and I still had no idea who he was when I finished. I did know there was very little of the "hooligan" about him. Life events that must have been critical to the boy Doug, and that could have been moving or revealing to the reader are treated as asides; his parents' divorce, his father's death, the accidental shooting death of another boy, the coming of the war are mentioned, but in a detached and general manner that gives us no insight into their formative effect on the author.

For a teacher of creative writing, Thayer has a rather monotonous style. His childhood is often reduced to laundry lists of activities, foods, and common mothering expressions without particular context. ("You'll put your eye out," was funny in A Christmas Story. Here, it's just another cliché in a basketful.)

Only in rare passages does the child of this narrative come alive, and these few instances are remarkable. Thayer's description of riding his bicycle out of town to go fishing alone (in Chapter 10) made me catch my breath and wonder if I just hadn't been paying attention up to that point. Most of the book is written in the first person plural, as if the author were part of a collective, or in the second person, which distances him even further from his own life. When Thayer lapses (and it does feel like inadvertence) into using "I", there is a suggestion of potential brilliance in his writing, and I got the feeling he might be capable of conveying so much more. But in a little under 200 pages, I marked less than half a dozen paragraphs for their lasting impact. Here's one of them: "All summer in our trips down to the fields we'd watched for pheasants, especially after the hay and grain were cut and you could see the flocks along the edges of the fields in the early evening, maybe twelve or fifteen hens and three or four roosters. If the setting sun was just right and the rooster turned, his whole breast shone like fire. Riding our bikes down the lanes, we heard the rooster cackling, the sound sharp, sudden and thrilling." If only he'd given us more of that and less of this: "Pick-and-shovel work was considered the least skilled and hardest of manual labors, and you were warned that it was what you would end up doing for the rest of your natural life if you didn't get a good job, the rest of your natural life being somehow longer and worse than just your life. Working on the railroad as a section hand laying track was also considered quite limited...You were constantly told you needed to amount to something, but you were never told what..."

When I read, I sometimes hear a voice in my head speaking the words. In this book, it was Andy Rooney's voice I heard. I realized that the style of Thayer's memoir reminded me of Mr. Rooney's style in the short pieces he does at the end of "60 Minutes", where it works quite well. Over the course of a full-length book, it wears very thin.

A blurb on the back cover of Hooligan asserts that Mr. Thayer is "known in some circles as a Mormon Hemingway." Another touts him as "One of the finest writers the LDS Church has yet produced". I don't much like Hemingway, but I don't see the parallels, either. I can't dispute the latter claim, because I don't know of any other writers "produced" by the LDS church. In a genre that includes works by Annie Dillard, Bobbie Ann Mason, Rick Bragg, Russell Baker, Robert MacNeil, Pete Hamill, Joan Didion, Elie Wiesel (I, too, can make lists), Hooligan falls far from the standard of excellence. Read An American Childhood, or A Drinking Life. You'll learn something, you'll feel something. You'll wish you could meet the author. That's what reading a memoir should do for you.

This memoir is truly a boy's story. The narrator tells the story from a boy's point of view with vivid details and wonderful vignettes. From the first page, where he comments "We were to be seen and not heard.", the narrative is filled with moments that resonated for me even though my own boyhood was much different than the author's. I found the episodic style another aspect that made this like a boy's story for it seemed more natural that he would tell it in this, somewhat unorganized, manner. Nevertheless I looked forward to each chapter and the new events and information that it would bring. The characters and events seemed real even when we learn few details about them.

The memoir provided sufficient detail to bring a different place and time alive. The accumulation of episodes and events led to a rich picture of another era when things were truly simpler. Again this rang true to me based on my own boyhood. The narrator includes changes in his life like the separation of his parents and his school experiences that provide an additional layer of meaning for the memoir. While there was a certain detachment of the narrator from all of this, the result for this reader was that the memoir took on a dreamlike quality that enhanced the feeling of difference in this particular place.

Through its presentation as an episodic boy's story the overall effect was one that made me feel that I was a participant in this story. I was satisfied as the narrative ended that I had shared some part of this interesting boyhood.