Winner of the 2007 Audie Award for Biography/Memoir and Finalist for Narration by the Author
From the Pulitzer Prize-winning, mega-bestselling author who wore his celebrity with extraordinary grace comes a magnificently appealing book about teaching and about how one great storyteller found his voice.
Frank McCourt became an unlikely star when, at the age of sixty-six, he burst onto the literary scene with Angela's Ashes,...

Extraordinary true stories of the Irish in America, their remarkable rise from urban poverty, and the powerful dynasties they engendered Author Stephen Birmingham, who chronicled the rise of Jewish immigrants to extraordinary wealth and success in "Our Crowd", now turns his attention to the Irish. Real Lace tells the colorful and fascinating true stories of America's most renowned Irish-Catholic families. Scions of courageous, driven, and resilient...

"'Tis is 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." "When Frank returns to America in 1953,...

"The fifth of eight children, Chris Forhan was born into a family of silence. His mother and father often sat in the same room but exchanged no words. He and his siblings learned, without being told, that certain thoughts and feelings were not to be shared. On the evenings his father didn't come home, the rest of the family would eat dinner without him, his whereabouts unknown, his absence pronounced but unspoken. And on a cold night just before Christmas...

Mike Leonard wanted to give his parents the ultimate family reunion. And so, one February morning, three generations of Leonards set out on their journey under the dazzling Arizona sky. In the course of their humorous, often poignant cross-country tour, from the desert Southwest to the New England coastline, the Leonards reminisce about their loves, their losses, and their rich and heartwarming (and sometimes heartbreaking) lives, while encountering...

"Finding herself struggling with depression (which, "like a rude houseguest," would come and go of its own accord), Sharon O'Brien set out to understand the origins of depression within her family, not willing to rely on the biochemical explanations and psychological accounts that prevail in contemporary American culture. Her quest took her straight into the pressures and possibilities of the American dream as it was experienced in the heart of her...