Word: angela
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...great acting is rounded out by Angela Bassett who plays Janet Reeves, the stubborn high school principal. Bassett is loud and emotional in her portrayal--the determination of her character shines right through. Moreover, Bassett and Streep complement each other well during many pivotal moments in the movie. When Guaspari's funding for the music program is cut and Reeves is unable to save it despite exhausting her efforts, the angry exchange between Streep and Bassett conveys the helplessness and frustration that many educators surely feel toward the politics of the education system. I was sold...
...sneakers that do it. It's the sneakers--gleaming white symbols of American prosperity--that are so irreconciliable with the picture of the bare-footed toddler that has flooded bookstores' shelves for the past three years on the cover of Angela's Ashes. It's the sneakers that are so unlike the scuffed lace-ups that he wears in the photograph on the front of his latest book, 'Tis, as he grins out at the world from his new home in New York. And so, as McCourt patiently waits for his turn to speak, I struggle--unable to reconcile...
...McCourt's ear for dialect is so flawless that I didn't notice he was reading from his second book. His talent first appeared in Angela's Ashes, the hugely successful childhood memoir that won a Pulitzer Prize. 'Tis is the sequel to that story, beginning with McCourt's journey to America on the MS Irish Oak in 1949, and ending in Belfast, 1985. In between, we experience first-hand the trials and triumphs of an American immigrant, from his days sweeping the lobby of the Biltmore hotel to striding down the halls of Stuyvesant as a respected teacher...
...McCourt writes with the same mix of humor and sadness that sustained him through Angela's Ashes, but this time a sharper edge of anger and resentment accompany his stories. The maturing McCourt loses the playfulness and innocence of childhood, replacing it with his father's fondness for drink, an acute social awareness, and a searing sense of ambition...
...serves as a reminder, in this age of cynicism, that there is still an American dream. McCourt, at age 66 and after finding the strength to write from the voices of three African-American writers, ultimately achieves that dream with the publication of Angela's Ashes. But the undercurrents of anger and resentment that reverberate through the book show us the raw underbelly of that dream: the humiliation, the loneliness, the despair and the jealousy. McCourt's second novel does not exist as an extension of his first book, devoid of any meaning. Rather, it shows us that the American...