SOURCE: "Generous Memories of a Poor, Painful Childhood," in The New York Times, September 17, 1996.

[In the review below, Kakutani asserts that McCourt's father bequeathed to him "two things: a childhood of awful, bone-chilling poverty and illness, and a magical gift for storytelling."]

"I know when Dad does the bad thing," Frank McCourt writes of his father in this remarkable new memoir [Angela's Ashes]. "I know when he drinks the dole money and Mam is desperate and has to beg at the St. Vincent de Paul Society and ask for credit at Kathleen O'Connell's shop but I don't want to back away from him and run to Mam. How can I do that when I'm up with him early every morning with the whole world asleep? He lights the fire and makes the tea and sings to himself or reads the paper to me in a whisper that won't...