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World Hotels - Pull Me Up: A Memoir
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List Price: $14.95
Our Price: $11.66
Your Save: $ 3.29 ( 22% )
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Manufacturer: W. W. Norton & Company
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Average Customer Rating: 
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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 920
EAN: 9780393326918
ISBN: 0393326918
Label: W. W. Norton & Company
Manufacturer: W. W. Norton & Company
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 325
Publication Date: 2005-06-13
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Studio: W. W. Norton & Company
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Editorial Reviews:
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A generational memoir of the American suburbs, Pull Me Up is a deeply affecting book. With prose that to Frank McCourt 'flashes with poetry', New York Times columnist Dan Barry tells the story of an unforgettable American family. He writes so crisply that we not only feel his emotions but also recall our own: the joy of Little League, the thrill of small-town reporting, the pain of losing a parent, and the fear of facing a life-threatening illness. Barry's writing has its own stalwart beauty, a single melody teased out of the American writer.
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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating: 
Summary: Great read
Comment: This is a great book, especially if you are Irish-American. I couldn't put it down. After this, read All Souls, Easter Rising, Castle of the Fynns... Slices of life about growing up Irish in American in the 1960's and 1970's....
Customer Rating:
Summary: Vivid and real
Comment: Anyone who reads Dan Barry's regular columns in the NYTimes will welcome his memoir first as if from a friend and buddy. Barry has given us, however, an extraordinary and, yes, radiant account of a man who would tell stories. He grew up in a haze of cigarette smoke, beer, and his father's howls of agony from migraine, but also with his mother's stories, his father's songs, and his siblings' affections. He traces his own journey to high school (casual boy torture on the school bus); St Bonaventure University (where he discovered you could make a job of tellling stories) to his early career in Rhode Island and then at the Times. He loves baseball, his mother dies, he and his beloved struggle first to conceive and then to adopt a child. He is diagnosed, and survives, a gaspingly terrible bout of cancer. Memoirs come by the handful, but Barry's is so vividly sketched, all the protagonists so fully present on the page, the prose so wickedly sure and sweet, that his sings close and real as a heartbeat. Wonderful.
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Summary: Living Write
Comment: As with all fine Irish writers, there's a poet's heart in Dan Barry.
Pull Me Up, A Memoir is Barry's masterful landscape of his life and family, wondrously painted with words poignant with pain and breathtaking in beauty. Never mind that the setting is the same Long Island I grew up in, nor the fact that this Irish-American love song calls to my own heritage, nor even the fact that there are personal connections I can trace to many of the people and places he writes about. The soul of Barry's story is its firm grip on universal human fears and foibles, how he captures the heart-piercing trials of childhood, youth, illness, addiction, and family.
Any reader who ever felt alone or insecure as a teenager, grew up with a sick parent, or whose family struggled with monthly bills will cherish the emotional depths to which Barry dives to harvest the treasures of his past. A truly rewarding read.
Kathy Carroll
http://www.oneclearcall.blogspot.com/
Customer Rating:
Summary: Wanted more
Comment: When I finished reading Dan Barry's book, I was hungry for more, but not so much on the same topic. Instead I wanted to find another book with narrative so well-written it would inspire me to fill my leisure time with nothing but reading. Sadly, there aren't many books that do that.
This one did. Perhaps it's my own connection to growing up in the same era, though I'm a bit younger. Maybe it's because we're both journalists, though books by journalists don't always merit reading sprints.
For me I think what astounded me was Barry's ability to be honest, allowing us to see the weaknesses of the people in the book and see those people as human, rather than evil (with a couple exceptions). As a reporter Barry has seen some amazing things, but that's not the focus of his book. Those things are sidelights in a story about family and about growing up. That takes amazing skill. I'm glad Barry lived long enough to tell us about it. In another 40 years or so, I'll be excited to read the sequel.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Beautiful
Comment: This is the best memoir I have ever read, beautifully written. While my Irish family is very different, I loved reading about his. I'm recommending the book to everyone.
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