Goodbye Frank McCourt

When I first laid my hands on Frank McCourt's Teacher Man, I was immediately hooked onto it. Teacher Man was one of Mr McCourt's genius work. I drowned into his sorrows, his love, his difficulty, his ingenuity, his blatant yet dark cynical humour. Teacher Man talks about life as a young teacher and how he coped in his first few years of his teaching career. It got me inspired and if you are a teacher, you can immediately relate to him. It seems like he's speaking up for all new teachers out there. And how apt, I read his masterpiece in NIE.

After loving Teacher Man, I moved on to read Angela's Ashes. I was so moved to tears and I must admit that I teared up a couple of times. Angela's Ashes spoke of his childhood of poverty, when his family moved back to Ireland during the Great Depression and how poverty made him such a survivor. Poverty also grabbed away his sibling's life... and how his mother went to dirt, toil and shame just to make sure that the family live.

'Tis was a brilliant one too. 'Tis illustrate his life as a new man, his relationships, his family back in the states and how he picked up his life for a better one, from a blue-collar to a university graduate and eventually an inspirational teacher in a high school.

Frank McCourt serves as an inspiration to me, he makes me pick up the pieces of what I had left and move on and integrate into normal life that I had. He made me feel human again, and how he felt that poverty made him grew stronger... It really set me thinking, how ungrateful we have all become.

Frank McCourt left us all on 19 July 2009 at the age of 78. He wrote 4 brilliant books, won a pulitzer prize with his first book and at the age of 60, and when the other authors asked him where had he been with all that talent, he replied, "I have been teaching."

He wrote only 4 books in his career as an author, one on poverty, one on teaching and one for his Mom......

Frank McCourt, you inspire me.