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.

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