Award winning book - the Pulitzer, National Book Critics Circle, Los Angeles Time Book, and the Abby Award. I was looking forward to this one and it did not disappoint. However I wouldn't recommend this as a "bed book." I kept staying up waaaaay too late to keep reading. The writing is wonderful, but the story is wrenching - the author's memoir of growing up in Limerick Ireland during the depression and WWII, the oldest child of a perpetually pregnant mother (Angela of the title)and alcoholic father. 
 McCourt vividly brings to life the tragedy of poverty while showing the humanity of individual people just trying to make a life for themselves and their families. McCourt exposes the cracks in the Catholic Church and the corrupt power of petty tyrants in local bureaucracies, but doesn't spare his own family - especially his cold impatient grandmother, abusive aunt and the almost criminal negligence of his alcoholic father. The father is a tragic figure - a literate, romantic man that always fails his family and McCourt is burdened with his resemblance with his "odd Northern manner and Protestant hair." I'd recommend this book to anyone.