Frank McCourt, RIP
The news today ranges from the sad to the slightly absurd. From the death of Angela’s Ashes author Frank McCourt to Amazon’s recalling books rightfully purchased by consumers, be prepared to experience a range of emotions. See below for extensive coverage.
- Frank McCourt, Pulitzer prize-winning author of Angela’s Ashes, passed away Sunday night at 78 after battling metatastic melanoma. Angela’s Ashes, the memoir of McCourt’s poverty-stricken childhood in Ireland, is his first and best known work, which some say spawned its own sub-genre of tales of tough childhood. McCourt wrote Angela’s Ashes in his sixties after 30 years of teaching in New York. The book became instantly popular, with the tale of desperate poverty ultimately bringing him significant wealth. The New York Times, Guardian, Los Angeles Times, and NPR all pay tribute to the great writer.
- Amazon has made another literary leap – taking purchased books off of their customers’ Kindles. On Friday, hundreds of Kindle owners who had purchased George Orwell’s 1984 and Animal Farm discovered that they were gone, replaced with a credit to their Kindle account. According to the New York Times, “the publisher changed its mind about offering an electronic edition, and apparently Amazon, whose business lives and dies by publisher happiness, caved.” A Times reader likened it to “Barnes & Noble sneaking into our homes in the middle of the night, taking some books that we’ve been reading off our nightstands, and leaving us a check on the coffee table.” That would be pretty Orwellian, eh?
- Lightening things up a bit, Omnivoracious has its weekly kid lit round-up, featuring road trip book tips, Shel Silverstein, and the next parody from Goodnight Goon author Michael Rex. The blog also discusses a Washington Post article about the disparity between books adults select for kids and the books kids actually like – in one study, the overlap was a measly 4%. Be sure to take a look before going solo into the children’s section of the library.
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