SOURCE: "McCourt's Memoir Awash in Tales of Ireland, Booze," in Chicago Tribune, October 22. 1996, pp. 1, 3.

[In the following review of Frank McCourt's memoir, Angela's Ashes, Blades relates the author's account of how the book came to be and what happened after the point at which the narrative ends.]

If ever a man could personally testify to the evils of drink, it's Frank McCourt. As a survivor of what he calls the worst kind of "miserable childhood … the miserable Irish Catholic childhood," McCourt traces most of that misery to the demons rum, stout and whiskey, which were consumed in profligate quantities by his father, a stereotypically "shiftless loquacious alcoholic" Irishman.

Every page of McCourt's new memoir, Angela's Ashes (Scribner), seems to reek of strong drink, and worse, as McCourt recalls in comically agonizing detail his father's marathon benders. The book is so full of dispiriting tales about his down-and-out boyhood...