McCourt's sequel to his Pulitzer Prize- winning Angela's Ashes picks up where that book left off and takes the reader to the mid-1980s. 'Tis starts strong. Drafted during the Korean War, McCourt served in Europe. Afterward, he returned to New York City, and, with stints on the docks and clerking, worked his way through New York University to become a teacher. There are flat spots where he drifts from boarding house to boarding house, job to job, and he begins to parody himself. Counseled to keep to his own kind, he reaches out. He describes the prejudice against Irish Catholicism at NYU and amuses us with descriptions of his struggle to fit in. Then he begins to see his life in rosy colors; his days teaching in New York's tough schools read as if he taught the Little Rascals, and he dodges the 1960s as best he can. Later, as a father who leaves his wife, his behavior mirrors his own father'sÄsomething he recognizes without exploring, truly a lost opportunity. A good book, 'Tis has an obligatory role to play with best-seller status, but it comes in a dim second to Angela's Ashes.ÄRobert Moore, Sudbury, MA (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

While not as tightly structured as his Pulitzer Prize'winning Angela's Ashes (1996), the irrepressible McCourt's follow-up memoir has the same driving rhythm, charm, and infectious humor that so captivated readers of the earlier installment. The story picks up in 1949 as McCourt, aged 19, sails to America to seek his fortune. Befriended by a priest who helps him settle in New York City, he's shocked when the man makes a drunken pass at him. His life in New York becomes one of seedy boarding houses, menial labor on the docks and warehouses, and, always, heavy drinking, often with his brothers Malachy and Michael. Conditionally admitted to New York University (he had no high school diploma), he's thrilled to show off his textbooks on the subway but bored with the class work. He'd rather read Sean O'Casey, ``the first Irish writer I ever read who writes about rags, dirt, hunger, babies dying. . . . '' He falls in love with and eventually marries Alberta ``Mike'' Small, a beautiful Episcopalian from New England. It's a marriage that will ``become a sustained squabble.'' His early years as a high school teacher, first at a vocational school on Staten Island, later at the prestigious Stuyvesant High School, are humorously and revealingly retold. His first words as a teacher? ``Stop throwing sandwiches.'' McCourt occasionally interrupts his chronological narrative with lengthy, if funny, portraits of characters he's met along the way. Angela, who has moved back to New York to be near her sons, has become a difficult, sickly woman upon whose death McCourt would write: ``I thought I'd know the grief of the grown man. . . . I didn't know I'd feel like a child cheated.'' Those whose hearts went out to the little boy who suffered so in Limerick might be put off by the hard-drinking, carousing grownup. But there's no denying McCourt's engaging wit. Is it as rewarding as Angela's Ashes? `Tis. (First serial to the New Yorker; Literary Guild main selection; author tour)

The second installment in McCourt's fluent and bewitchingly candid memoir will be eagerly embraced by a reading public madly in love with the first, the award-winning and best-selling Angela's Ashes (1996). Here McCourt, still simultaneously voluble and precise, chronicles his return to New York, the city of his birth. A high-school dropout with a thick brogue, terrible teeth and skin, and red and infected eyes, he is easy pickings for a priest who helps him get settled, then attempts to molest him. This distressing introduction to the perversity of life in America kicks off an almost unbelievable series of humiliations and hardships as McCourt works soul-crushingly menial jobs for pittance and is confronted both with vicious anti-Irish prejudice and tedious Irish pride--nearly everyone he meets recounts their Irish genealogy and tells him to stick to his own kind. McCourt stubbornly dreams of becoming a teacher and writer but often retreats from the demands of college and work into the comforting haze of alcohol, the bane of his family. Finally, after a stint in the army and years of being mocked for his bookish ways, he succeeds in becoming a teacher, and his riveting accounts of his crazy classroom experiences in a Staten Island vocational high school at the height of McCarthyism are not to be missed. His family is present, too, of course. His mother, Angela, remains depressed even under her sons' solicitous care. His father is impossible right up to the day he dies, and McCourt's brothers, Malachy (who has also written a memoir) and Mike, live "bright carefree" lives, while he does everything the hard way, the only way he knows how, and, frankly, the only approach to life he fully respects. --Donna Seaman