"This book will be a great and compelling reading experience, deeply moving, profoundly intelligent, and totally entertaining, including fiction and memoir about: * Brothers by choice, or from different families but closely bonded by shared experience, work, trauma, love and marriage. * Brothers who describe themselves as 'brothers in arms, blood brothers, a band of brothers, the brother I never had.' The premise of Blauner's commentary and selections is that brothers and brotherhood is important, and crucial to understanding ourselves, our families, and our place in the world. Not 'a valentine' but an edgy, challenging, confrontive and intimate psychological perspective with a big mix of tone, culture, and narrative style. The key is in the very high quality of the writers and their work."
"A third memoir from the author of the huge international bestsellers Angela’s Ashes and ‘Tis. In Teacher Man, Frank McCourt reads his own account of his illustrious, amusing, and sometimes rather bumpy long years as an English teacher in the public high schools of New York City.
Frank McCourt arrived in New York as a young, impoverished and idealistic Irish boy – but who crucially had an American passport, having been born in Brooklyn. He didn't know what he wanted except to stop being hungry and to better himself. On the subway he watched students carrying books. He saw how they read and underlined and wrote things in the margin and he liked the look of this very much. He joined the New York Public Library and every night when he came back from his hotel work he would sit up reading the great novels.
Building his confidence and his determination, he talked his way into NYU and gained a literature degree and so began a teaching career that was to last 30 years, working in New York's public high schools. Frank estimates that he probably taught 12,000 children during this time and it is on this relationship between teacher and student that he reflects in Teacher Man, the third in his series of memoirs.
The New York high school is a restless, noisy and unpredictable place and Frank believes that it was his attempts to control and cajole these thousands of children into learning and achieving something for themselves that turned him into a writer. At least once a day someone would put up their hand and shout 'Mr. McCourt, Mr. McCourt, tell us about Ireland, tell us about how poor you were…' Through sharing his own life with these kids he learnt the power of narrative storytelling, and out of the invaluable experience of holding 12,000 people's attention came Angela's Ashes.
Frank McCourt was a legend in such schools as Stuyvesant high school – long before he became the figure he is now he would receive letters from former students telling him how much his teaching influenced and inspired them – and now in Teacher Man he will share his reminiscences of those 30 years as well as revealing how they led to his own success with Angela's Ashes and 'Tis."
"McCourt’s Pulitzer Prize winning look back at his childhood. “It was, of course, a miserable childhood: the happy childhood is hardly worth your while…”
“When I look back on my childhood, I wonder how I survived 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.
People everywhere brag or whimper about the woes of their early years, but nothing can compare with the Irish version: the poverty; the shiftless loquacious father; the pious defeated mother moaning by the fire; pompous priests; bullying shcoolmasters; the English and the terrible things they did to us for eight hundred long years. Above all we were wet…”
So begins Frank McCourt’s stunning memoir of his childhood in Ireland and America, a recollection of unvarnished truth and no self pity, of grinding poverty and indomitable spirit that will live in the memory long after the tape has ended.
Now a major film directed by Alan Parker and starring Robert Carlyle and Emily Watson."
"Frank McCourt’s sequel to his Pulitzer Prize winning memoir Angela’s Ashes, focussing on the “great country”, America
Angela’s Ashes was a publishing phenomenon. Frank McCourt’s critically acclaimed, lyrical memoir of his Limerick childhood won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics’ Circle Award, the Royal Society of Literature Award and the Los Angeles Times Award amongst others, and rapidly became a word-of-mouth bestseller topping all charts worldwide for over two years. It left readers and critics alike eager to hear more about Frank McCourt’s incredible, poignant life.
’Tis is the story of Frank’s American journey from impoverished immigrant with rotten teeth, infected eyes and no formal education to brilliant raconteur and schoolteacher."
