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Band: Sioux Falls Ceili Band
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Band: String Thaw
Submitted: Ciara Breen
Review:
String Thaw is based in Rapid City. They are a family band - Mike
(mandolin, bodhran) Holly (tin whistle and recorder) and Ben (fiddle,
guitar, bouzouki). We didn't get to hear them with the fiddle, but they
definitely are a good sounding band. They play a lot of jigs, reels,
and hornpipes. They play great fast traditional stuff and some slow airs.
They also are fairly interactive with the crowd. If you can play the
bodhran, dance, sing they ask you to join them!
If you're ever in the Rapid City area - check them out!
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Book: Angela's
Ashes by Frank McCourt
Submitted: Colleen Schulte
"When I look back on my childhood I wonder how I managed to survive at
all. It was, of course, a miserable childhood: the happy childhood is
hardly worth your while. Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood is
the miserable Irish childhood, and worse yet is the miserable Irish
Catholic childhood."
So begins the luminous memoir of Frank McCourt, born in Depression-era
Brooklyn to recent Irish immigrants and raised in the slums of Limerick,
Ireland. Frank's mother, Angela, has no money to feed the children since
Frank's father Malachy, rarely works, and when he does he drinks his
wages. Yet Malachy does nurture in Frank an appetite for the one thing
he can provide: a story.
Angela's Ashes received the Pulitzer Prize, National Book Critics Circle
Award, Salon Book Award, American Library Association Award, Los Angeles
Times Book Award, and Boston Book Review's Anne Rea Jewell Nonfiction
Prize, and American Booksellers Association Book of the Year. The book
was adapted as a major motion picture in 1999, directed by Alan Parker.
Comments: I thought this was hilarious, depressing, funny, sad! I
couldn't put it down. I even loaned it to me mother! The movie version
didn't do the book justice.
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Book: Tis
by Frank McCourt
Submitted: Colleen Schulte
Review Book
'Tis: A Memoir is the less than perfect yet compelling sequel to
Angela's Ashes which continues Frank McCourt's life journey after his
return to New York in 1949 as an awkward but hopeful 19-year-old with
bad eyes and a brogue that becomes both a charm and a curse. Other Irish
immigrants assist young Frank with jobs sweeping floors in a hotel and
loading trucks in the warehouse district while admonishing him to stay
with his own kind.
While McCourt's engaging style and irrepressible voice flows through
these pages, 'Tis lacks the luminescent quality of Angela's Ashes.
Despite the family's lack of food and adequate housing or clothing, the
characters revealed their young souls. In the sequel, McCourt seems to
recognize that he can't recapture that innocence and tries to piggyback
onto the emotional impact of the earlier book. Sometimes it works, as
when he walks the streets of Limerick reminiscing. It's certainly
important for those who didn't read the earlier work to understand vital
background information, but by the fifth time he wishes he "didn't give
a fiddler's fart" just like his Uncle Pa Keating, the redundancy began
to annoy.
Comment: I didn't appreciate this book as much as Angela's Ashes. I
felt it was a letdown because Angela's Ashes was so well written.
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Book: Teacher Man
by Frank McCourt
Submitted: Colleen Schulte
Review Book:
Teacher Man (2006), which is an account of Frank McCourt's thirty-year
teaching career with the New York City public school system. Renowned
for his irreverant charm and self-effacing wit, McCourt first became a
literary star at the age of 66, after establishing himself as a
dedicated and beloved English teacher at McKee Vocational High School in
Staten Island, Seward Park High School on the Lower East Side, and
Manhattan's famous, fiercely competitive Stuyvesant High School.
Teacher Man is the third in a trilogy that includes the runaway
bestsellers, Angela's Ashes (1996), a memoir of McCourt's impoverished
childhood in Limerick, Ireland, and 'Tis (1999), an account of his early
years as a struggling immigrant in America.
Comments: I haven't read the book yet, but would like to read it. If
someone has, please send in a review.
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