SNIPPET: In 1996, Irish-American author Frank McCOURT published his memoir ("Angela's Ashes") of growing up in Ireland in a poor Catholic family. His first work - but he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for this extraordinarily beautiful and haunting book. It is written from a child's point of view, experiencing grinding poverty with a voice clear, bright and innocent. Per reviews - "It is the story of grown-ups at the mercy of life and children at the mercy of grown-ups, and Frank's lyrical Irish voice is seductive and hilarious. You won't know whether to weep or roar, and you will find yourself doing both at once!" His father was Malachy McCOURT, born on a farm in Toome, Co. Antrim, and his mother, Angela SHEEHAN, who grew up in a Limerick slum. There is a photo of Frank in the playground of LEAMY's School in Limerick, Ireland, circa 1938. "Out in the Atlantic Ocean great sheets of rain gathered to drift slowly up the River Shannon and settle forever in Limerick. The rain dampened the city from the Feast of the Circumcision to New Year's Eve. It created a cacophony of hacking coughs, bronchial rattles, asthmatic wheezes, consumptive croaks. It turned noses into fountains, lungs into bacterial sponges. It provoked cures galore; to ease the catarrh you boiled onions in milk blackened with pepper; for the congested passages you made a paste of boiled flour and nettles, wrapped it in a rag, and slapped it, sizzling on the chest. From October to April the walls of Limerick glistened with the damp. Clothes never dried; tweed and woolen coats housed living things, sometimes sprouted mysterious vegetations. The rain drove us into the church - our refuge, our strength, our only dry place. At Mass, Benediction, novenas, we huddled in great damp clumps, dozing through priest drone, while steam rose again from our clothes! to mingle with the sweetness of incense, flowers and candles. Limerick gained a reputation for piety, but we knew it was only the rain."