Word: childhoods
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...includes a new generation of fans who discovered Michael during these days of retrospection and rushed to download "Thriller" as their ringtone and call up his videos on YouTube. They had their representatives as well, in the form of the Jackson children we had seldom seen before. His own childhood melted by fame, Michael tried obsessively to keep his sons and daughter from being burned by its glare. They didn't go to school; they appeared in public masked and veiled. And so it was almost a shock to see them, with the TV camera behaving cautiously at first, sweeping...
...remembering the same songs; some speakers had been on TV sharing the same thoughts. Yet hearing brother Jermaine deliver "Smile," Michael's favorite song, to a crowd whose hearts were breaking had an entirely different effect than Jermaine's singing it to Matt Lauer. Hearing Gordy recall Michael's childhood audition was more moving than the dozens of bio reels that had sought the same response...
...match for the grinding poverty that Malachy's drinking brought upon the family, and for the cold and damp of Limerick. They became so poor that three of the children - twin brothers and a baby girl - died of disease and malnutrition. "It was, of course, a miserable childhood," McCourt famously wrote in Angela's Ashes, in a passage that's worth quoting in full. "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 and whimper about the woes...
...many years, McCourt tried and failed to write about his childhood. The family talent for storytelling kept him alive in the classroom, but he couldn't get the words down on paper. He kept company in bars with writers like Pete Hamill and Jimmy Breslin, but his own voice stubbornly refused to emerge. The psychological weight of his past may have weighed him down. It also took a toll on his personal life; first one, then a second marriage ended in divorce. (He was married a third time, happily and permanently, in 1994.) He left the Catholic Church...
...book told the story of his early years in a voice purged of anger and bitterness and self-pity. In an extraordinary act of forgiveness, he wrote about his father with humor and even compassion. Angela's Ashes was published quietly, as the personal memoir of an Irish childhood. "My dream was to have a Library of Congress catalog number, that's all," McCourt said. But it became first a critical sensation, then a runaway best seller. In 1997 McCourt won the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize. (See TIME's best books...