'Tis

Readers all throughout the world have adored and praised Frank McCourt's wonderful childhood memoir, Angela's Ashes, for its energy, humor, and deep humanity. It is a narrative of redemption in which the act of storytelling itself provides salvation; it was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, the Los Angeles Times Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Seldom has a work been established in the literary canon with so rapidity.

And now we have This, the tale of Frank's transformation from poor immigrant to accomplished educator and raconteur in America. At the age of nineteen, Frank arrives in New York on a boat with a priest he meets. After landing a position at the Biltmore Hotel, where he was first exposed to the striking hierarchies of this "classless country," he is recruited into the army and sent to Germany to work as a typewriter and dog trainer. These encounters are made enthralling by Frank's unique voice, his unusual sense of humor, and his amazing conversation sense.

When Frank comes home to America in 1953, he works on the docks and defies everyone's advice to "stick to their own kind" once they arrive. This is despite the fact that men and women had hoped and struggled for years to get to America. Frank speaks his way into New York University despite having dropped out of school at the age of fourteen because he feels in some manner that he should be receiving an education. There, he attempts to realize his ideal after falling in love with the blonde, long-legged embodiment of the classic Yankee. Frank doesn't realize he belongs in the world, however, until he begins to write and teach. In Angela's Ashes, the boy matures.

"It is only the best storyteller who can so beguile his readers that he leaves them wanting more when he is done," Malcolm Jones said in his Newsweek review of Angela's Ashes, and McCourt shows himself to be among the very best. One of the most anticipated novels of our time is Frank McCourt's "This," and it is a masterpiece.