yong : book 7/25 : Angela's Ashes by Frank McCourt

Imagine deciding to write a book after retiring from thirty years teaching English in New York high schools. Imagine this first book going on to win the Pulitzer Prize. Frank McCourt's memoir about growing up in Limerick, Ireland, is a coming of age story unlike any you've ever heard before. It's a coming of age story that takes place in abject poverty. If you have a bleeding heart, stories like this are its reason for being. If your heart is stone, this is a story that can squeeze blood from it.

Yes, it's heartbreaking. Yes, it's sometimes difficult to find the motivation to keep reading, keep subjecting yourself to this stark world, when it's so much more pleasant to be surrounded by the luxuries and creature comforts of your own. But that's why we read in the first place, to experience vicariously those parts of life, of being human, that we might never encounter in our own lives, to flesh out the whole, to give us perspective and broaden our understanding of what it means to be human, of what it means to live. We sit here in the comfort of our warm apartments and offices, idly staring at the glow of our computer monitors, and we would find it hard to live without something as basic as high speed internet. As basic as high speed internet. We, you and I, have no idea what it means to be hungry, truly hungry. Not a foggy clue. Frank McCourt gives us a chance to experience that. A chance to experience what it means to be truly cold, not just for the five minutes you have to be outside before you can duck into someplace warm, because there is no place warm to duck into. A chance to be homeless, to not have shelter, or not much of one. A chance to be poor. And to see it all through a child's eyes, without self-pity, just as a matter of fact. And to sometimes be able to laugh at it. And to sometimes be able to rise above it.