Word: tis
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...Tis the season when seniors trudge between Harvard Square and Logan Airport carrying overnight bags and leather binders, decked out in business suits...
...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 the image of the comfortable American retiree before me with the stories I have read. I struggle, that is, until...
...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...
...while we learn in 'Tis that his students learned something about similes, metaphors and five-paragraph essays, it seems that McCourt taught them a far more important lesson--that of the strength and resilience of the human spirit. When asked how he "survived poverty," McCourt said that he did it with a sense of humor, storytelling and "the dream that we were going to get out of that lane-- to get to America by hook or by crook...
...Tis 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...