Quick Take
- Narration: Frank McCourt reads his own memoir, and the description had already argued for that voice before the credit confirmed it.
- Themes: Immigration and reinvention, class inside a supposedly classless country, the long road into a classroom.
- Mood: Wry, restless, self-implicating.
- Verdict: Fourteen hours of one of the great talkers, on a listing whose numbers make no sense.
An audiobook from October 1999 is an odd object to hold up to the light in 2026, and this listing makes it odder still. Frank McCourt reads his own sequel to Angela's Ashes across fourteen hours and five minutes, the rating box claims two votes and displays 4.4, and five written responses sit underneath a counter that says two. The earliest of those responses arrives nearly twelve years after the release date and describes a CD set played at work.
What We Made of It
Frank McCourt is credited as author and as reader, which on this particular book is not a cost-saving measure but the whole point of the exercise. The publisher's copy makes the argument before the credit confirms it: it is "Frank's incomparable voice" and "his astonishing ear for dialogue" that render these experiences spellbinding, says the description of a memoir by a man who talked his way into New York University after leaving school at fourteen. Prose and performance come out of the same throat. Worth noticing how much of the description is spent on the previous book rather than this one: the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Award, and a Newsweek line from Malcolm Jones about a storyteller who "leaves them wanting more when he is done." The sequel gets its turn only after all of that.
Nineteen is how old Frank is when he lands in New York, in the company of a priest he met on the boat. What follows is a catalog of American jobs: the Biltmore Hotel, where he runs straight into the "vivid hierarchies of this 'classless country'"; the army, which sends him to Germany to train dogs and type reports; the docks, after he returns in 1953. Everyone tells him that people who dreamed and toiled for years to reach America should "stick to their own kind" once they arrive, and he keeps declining the advice.
Fourteen hours and five minutes hands one voice a very long runway, and this is the voice to hand it to. The method is accumulation, job after job and humiliation after humiliation, until an education arrives and the writing starts. McCourt does not build toward a single scene. He builds toward a change of profession, which is a stranger and a truer shape for a life than a climax would be. The love story, when it arrives, gets described in the copy as "the quintessential Yankee, long-legged and blonde," a phrase that says as much about who is doing the looking as about who is being looked at.
The Best Parts of 'Tis
Linda H., posting on January 22, 2026, is enthusiastic and is discussing something else entirely. "I bought Tis as a Used Very Good quality book and it's like new. A good way to go price-wise. Highly recommend this method of purchasing." That is a review of a secondhand hardcopy, and of the wisdom of buying secondhand hardcopies, filed underneath a 1999 audio edition. The five stars are sincere. The object earning them is not the one on this page.
Two of the remaining four are describing print as well. KHAN ASIF enjoyed "reading" the first book and reports that this one is "a continuation of the first book and I have not finished it all yet." Pam's entire verdict runs "What a joy to read." Only the reviewer signing as "just my opinion :)" is unambiguously listening: "I got this CD set to listen to at work." That same entry reports having already been through Angela's Ashes and having moved on to Teacher Man, which makes it the one response here tracking the memoirs as recordings.
Whoever set the number on this listing made an arithmetic promise it cannot keep. A 4.4 average cannot emerge from two whole-star votes under any rounding rule anyone uses, since two votes land only on whole or half points. Five people have meanwhile written responses, and a written response ordinarily carries a vote along with it. Either the counter is stale or it is counting something narrower than the review column, and the badge is best treated as decoration.
A Few Reservations
Germany, army dogs and typed reports are in this book. Mountaineering is not. The listing files the memoir under biographies and memoirs, which is right, and also under sports and outdoors with the tag "Adventurers, Explorers & Survival," which is not. An immigrant's first decade in New York is a survival story in a sense that tag was never built to hold, and anybody browsing that category will arrive expecting weather.
Sports and outdoors is not the only field pointing sideways. The series line reads "The Frank McCourt Memoirs" with no position attached to it, so nothing here marks this out as the second of them. The description will: its opening sentence calls the book the "eagerly anticipated sequel" to Angela's Ashes. A reviewer supplies the third title, Teacher Man, without being asked. The metadata is emptier than the prose printed directly above it.
Pam's line about laughing "throughout much of his story" while "even having a little disdain for his behaviors at times" is the most useful caution available here. The copy calls Angela's Ashes a "glorious childhood memoir." This one opens on a nineteen-year-old at a ship's rail and follows a man who makes choices, several of which the reader who adored the first book is not going to admire. Anyone arriving for more of the childhood should adjust in advance. Nobody on this page objects to that shift, which is itself worth noting: a column of fours and fives is content to be disappointed in the man and to keep listening anyway.
Who Should Listen to 'Tis
Memoir listeners who want a voice more than a plot get fourteen hours of exactly that, delivered by the person it belongs to. Vicki Thayer's summary serves as well as any: "A great transition back to America, coming to terms with it, planning a life and planting his Irish/American flag." Somebody who has never met Angela's Ashes can still begin here, since the description recaps it at length, though all five reviewers had been through the earlier book before they got to this one. Anyone who wants a tight narrative arc, or who bounces off self-deprecation sustained for hours at a stretch, will find the accumulation tiring rather than cumulative.
Let McCourt talk and the fourteen hours go by on their own. Just do not read the 4.4, the two-vote counter or the survival tag as descriptions of anything that exists. The only fields on this page worth trusting are the runtime and the name that appears in two places.
