'Tis

Frank McCourt arrives in New York from Ireland, carrying an accent that marks him out immediately and a set of manners built for a much smaller, much poorer place. He takes whatever laboring work he can find and spends his off hours in the public library, one of the only places in the city that lets him in without asking anything of him first.

He's drafted during the Korean War and ends up serving it out in Germany as a clerk-typist rather than in combat, a posting that still gets him to Dachau, delivering laundry to the Army facilities there — a passage he writes as haunting, and not only for himself. Back in New York on the GI Bill, he works his way through NYU on warehouse and office jobs, meets and marries a woman named Alberta Small, and starts teaching — eight years at a vocational high school on Staten Island, then substitute work, then a job teaching English at Stuyvesant.

It's the middle book of a trilogy and reads like one — it assumes the reader already has Angela's Ashes behind them and doesn't re-explain the childhood it's built on, so coming to it cold loses some of what makes McCourt's later choices land. What it has that the first book doesn't is a patient, unglamorous account of becoming someone specific — a teacher, a husband — after years of being defined mainly by what he'd survived. It ends with the family bringing his mother Angela's ashes back to Ireland, which is as close as the book gets to closing a loop opened decades earlier.