Tis HC Frank McCourt Scribner 1999 (Signed?)??

Description

‘Tis: A Memoir Hardcover – Unabridged
by Frank McCourt (Author)

The #1 New York Times bestselling sequel to the beloved Pulitzer Prize-winning classic memoir, Angela’s Ashes, about McCourt’s coming of age as an immigrant in America.

Frank McCourt’s glorious childhood memoir, Angela’s Ashes, has been loved and celebrated by readers everywhere for its spirit, its wit and its profound humanity. A tale of redemption, in which storytelling itself is the source of salvation, it won the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. Rarely has a book so swiftly found its place on the literary landscape.

And now we have ‘Tis, the story of Frank’s American journey from impoverished immigrant to brilliant teacher and raconteur. Frank lands in New York at age nineteen, in the company of a priest he meets on the boat. He gets a job at the Biltmore Hotel, where he immediately encounters the vivid hierarchies of this “classless country,” and then is drafted into the army and is sent to Germany to train dogs and type reports. It is Frank’s incomparable voice — his uncanny humor and his astonishing ear for dialogue — that renders these experiences spellbinding.

When Frank returns to America in 1953, he works on the docks, always resisting what everyone tells him, that men and women who have dreamed and toiled for years to get to America should “stick to their own kind” once they arrive. Somehow, Frank knows that he should be getting an education, and though he left school at fourteen, he talks his way into New York University. There, he falls in love with the quintessential Yankee, long-legged and blonde, and tries to live his dream. But it is not until he starts to teach — and to write — that Frank finds his place in the world. The same vulnerable but invincible spirit that captured the hearts of readers in Angela’s Ashes comes of age.

As Malcolm Jones said in his Newsweek review of Angela’s Ashes, “It is only the best storyteller who can so beguile his readers that he leaves them wanting more when he is done…and McCourt proves himself one of the very best.” Frank McCourt’s ‘Tis is one of the most eagerly awaited books of our time, and it is a masterpiece.

The sequel to Frank McCourt’s memoir of his Irish Catholic boyhood, Angela’s Ashes, picks up the story in October 1949, upon his arrival in America. Though he was born in New York, the family had returned to Ireland due to poor prospects in the United States. Now back on American soil, this awkward 19-year-old, with his “pimply face, sore eyes, and bad teeth,” has little in common with the healthy, self-assured college students he sees on the subway and dreams of joining in the classroom. Initially, his American experience is as harrowing as his impoverished youth in Ireland, including two of the grimmest Christmases ever described in literature. McCourt views the U.S. through the same sharp eye and with the same dark humor that distinguished his first memoir: race prejudice, casual cruelty, and dead-end jobs weigh on his spirits as he searches for a way out. A glimpse of hope comes from the army, where he acquires some white-collar skills, and from New York University, which admits him without a high school diploma. But the journey toward his position teaching creative writing at Stuyvesant High School is neither quick nor easy. Fortunately, McCourt’s openness to every variety of human emotion and longing remains exceptional; even the most damaged, difficult people he encounters are richly rendered individuals with whom the reader can’t help but feel uncomfortable kinship. The magical prose, with its singing Irish cadences, brings grandeur and beauty to the most sorrowful events, including the final scene, set in a Limerick graveyard.

Series: The Frank McCourt Memoirs
Hardcover: 368 pages
Publisher: Scribner; Scribner 1999 edition

Angela’s Ashes was a unique accomplishment on many levels. Tis was doomed before it ever came out because it would suffer by comparison. However, this is still a great read by an interesting man who has great sensitivity to dialogue, and makes some stinging social observations with great subtlety. The books cannot be compared unless you have strong feelings about the skill the writer had, or did not have in either volume. Is the language rougher, yes, this is a man describing his life, not a child. Does he have opinions that are black and white, with little room for gray at times, yes. Part of the problem with moving from one book to the next, is that the memories of a child, and terrible memories at that, are a powerful force to draw you in, and cause one to feel great sympathy and pain for the child. Then the child becomes a man, and it’s much more difficult to carry the same empathy from the first book to the second. In fact I don’t think it is possible. If you have read neither book, read this first, and then Angela’s Ashes. The books change dramatically when you do. The harsh criticism of the man becomes infinitely more complex and difficult if you learn of the childhood that was his formative years. Most autobiographies, or biographies cover a life, not pieces of a life that in this case are still unfolding. The abrupt change from book one to book two is caused, I believe, because they are bound separately. If he had covered the same period in his life with a single book it would have been more comfortable for the reader. I am glad that he did break his life up, as Angela’s Ashes will forever remain a book that will gain the title of a “Classic”. Book one was brilliant, it was the author’s first, it won The Pulitzer, it won other awards, it is about to be shown as a major motion picture. There is no one that can follow that act #1. Frank McCourt is a great writer who I wish had come to us sooner. I hope he lives to be a hundred so I may selfishly read as much as possible of what he writes.

Sticker on back cover. Few stains on spine. Otherwise near mint. 0-684-84878-3.

0-688011160

Back of book got wet. Pages have that wavy feel when wet pages dry. No sticking. 1st print.