A Long Stone's Throw

November 3, 2008
Alphie is the youngest of the four McCourt brothers and the third-after Frank and Malachy-to pen a memoir about his life in Ireland and the U.S. Being a decade younger than Frank, we see the Limerick of the early 1950s is still a hard life for the McCourts, but with the brothers leaving for America-and being drafted into the U.S. Army-there is now money coming into the household. Still it is the same bleak landscape that Frank wrote about in Angela's Ashes, full of class-based bias and still under the thumb Holy Mother Church. This book is a nomadic adventure worthy of Ulysses. We see Alphie coming to America, going to Canada, finally reentering the U.S. and going into the Army as, of all things, a No. 10 can food inspector. After jobs in bars and journeys to Dublin and California, Archie finally settles in New York, finds a wife and has a child. McCourt always finds irony in life and his tales of the bar and restaurant business and its clientele are laugh-out-loud funny. Sensitive, lyrical, funny, stubborn, impetuous, McCourt writes with a steady hand, a joyful heart, and an Irishman's sense of life's absurdities.

March 2, 2009
Stepping out from the shadows of his talented elder brothers, Frank and Malachy, the youngest of the McCourt clan offers his version of his family’s famously miserable childhood in Limerick and subsequent journey to America. McCourt narrates his memoir with a slow, contemplative tone that transcends the limitations of recorded audio as he connects on a deeply personal level with his audience. Though his delivery is slow and straightforward, the melancholy lilt in his voice is Irish throughout, and listeners will appreciate and understand the story all the better because of his reading. A Sterling and Ross hardcover (Review Annex).