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FROM LIMERICK LANES TO SUPERHIGWAY - ASHES WAR ENTERS NEW ERA!
(PRWEB) September 16, 2000

PRESS RELEASE

FROM: TREATY STONE PUBLISHING.

ASHES POUR FROM LIMERICK LANES TO CYBERSPACE

American e-book publishing giants Greatunpublished.com have this week launched the electronic edition of Limerickman Gerard Hannan’s controversial national bestseller ‘ASHES’ which was written and published in response to Frank McCourt’s international multi-million sales ANGELA’S ASHES.

According to Kathy Lindenmayer, Assistant Editor at Greatunpublished, “I can say unequivocally that Mr. Hannan is the first Irish author whose book is for sale globally as both an e-book and paperback title and we are very excited and thrilled about the launch.”

Hannan, who is about to embark on a short American promotional tour opening with a speaking engagement at the College Of Charleston in October has confirmed his excitement at the prospect of global sales for his book.

‘Since the outset of my campaign to have the other side of Frank McCourt’s story told I have never dreamed that an opportunity like this would come along,’ he said this week.

Hannan is also hoping that his second book ‘TIS IN ME ASS’ will also become available at Greatunpublished later this month.

ASHES is available in paperback or electronic form at http://www.greatunpublished.com

ENDS

CONTACTS:

Gerard Hannan

Limerick: 061 315668

Mobile: 087 4186081

Kathy Lindenmayer (Assistant Editor)

Greatunpublished.com

USA – 001 -8435790000

____________________________________________

FURTHER INFORMATION:

What other papers have had to say on this debate:

There was an old town...

By Paul Daffey /Evening Standard

Two families were feuding over ascendancy in the drug trade. A member of one family was walking along a footpath when a car sidled up to the kerb. A member of the opposing family jumped out of the car and stabbed the pedestrian in the stomach - with a pitchfork.

The weapon of choice threw a rural twist on an urban tale. It was emblematic of an Ireland that, in the final decades of last century, was wrangling with itself over the shift from rural backwater to urban dynamism.

The pitchfork incident could have taken place in Dublin or Cork, maybe even the light-spirited Galway, but somehow this seemed unlikely. Right or wrong, it did suggest merit behind Limerick's reputation as Stab City.

It is a reputation that Limerick hates, largely because it is distasteful, but also because the sobriquet was applied 30 years ago and the city has changed since then.

In the '70s, the development of high-tech industries and the University of Limerick, which specialises in science and technology, brought a measure of wealth and vitality to the city. But it also created an income gap, with residents of rugged housing estates resenting the new order.

Crime and violence were the inevitable result. The rest of the country gained the impression that stabbings were frequent. It titillated some to think of Limerick, with its reputation for inwardness and pious Catholicism, as a bloody frontier.

Violence in Limerick lessened in the '90s after, among other things, the formation of "combat poverty" groups with funds from the European Union. EU money was also put towards restoration of the town's fading buildings.

The Civic Trust, formed in the late '80s as the first restoration body in Ireland, was instrumental in giving the worn city a facelift that impressed the rest of the country, although not enough to stop the stabbing slurs and the tittering.

Limerick is proud of its recovery but, after years of scorn, it is defensive. When the Angela's Ashes phenomenon broadcast the city's folly to the world, it became too much for some.

Frank McCourt's depiction of the squalor in the city by the River Shannon in the 1930s and '40s raised the hackles of one resident so much that he bothered to write a retort. Ashes, Gerard Hannan's memoir of a rosier childhood in Limerick, has hardly set sales records but the author considers its publication a success.

Described disparagingly in the Limerick Post as a bookseller and part-time disc jockey, Hannan was reported in that newspaper as saying that Angela's Ashes should be reclassified as fiction.

"I think it has been a successful campaign because there are people out there now saying this (the book) is not 100 per cent accurate. This is the object of the exercise, so mission accomplished."

His crusade also includes talkback sessions on his radio program. A good percentage of callers support his sunny view of the city's past. The dissenters, according to the Limerick Post, get cut off, an act the newspaper describes on its website as that of a schoolyard bully. The fact that he only polled 65 votes in recent local elections only adds to their scorn.

"He can hardly be said to represent the views of the people of Limerick," the Post says. "While he accuses McCourt of holding up our city of the past to ridicule and condemnation, he, in the guise of being Limerick's champion, is only exposing our modern-day Limerick to mockery."

Frank Larkin, the public relations officer for Shannon Development, says half the city claims the poverty in the book is exaggerated. "People felt it reflected poorly. They claim they had happy childhoods and were happy in Limerick. You have that dichotomy of discussion. But there's certainly a contrast between what Frank McCourt described and today."

He says Alan Parker, the creator of the Angela's Ashes movie, barely filmed in Limerick because the city now lacks the requisite decay. "We weren't able to come up with any of those buildings and lanes because there weren't any left. They had to go to Dublin and Cork to find rundown buildings and derelict lanes...nothing against the people of Dublin and Cork."

Larkin is unable to put a figure on Angela's Ashes importance to the city, although he admits it has become a huge selling point. Other attractions include castles, cathedrals, Georgian architecture, the Limerick Expo in March and the International Marching Bands Festival, also in March, which attracts 40,000 people.

The city's push - and for that matter Ireland's push - to improve the poor quality of mid-range restaurants has spawned the International Food Festival, which is held annually, and the Good Food Circle of Restaurants. We tried only the Mogul Emperor in Henry Street, where the food was much like Indian food anywhere in the Western world.

Limerick might be trying to improve its culinary standing but it has no doubts about its sporting prowess. The city thumps its chest about being Ireland's sporting capital. It is, at best, a dubious claim, but one that receives support every autumn when Limerick hosts the battles between Munster and touring rugby sides from the Antipodes. Munster, the province that takes in the six counties in Ireland's south-west, attacks the touring teams with a fervor that inevitably attracts "Gael force" headlines. In 1978, the attack was so effective that Munster defeated New Zealand, a feat that was barely believed across Europe, and less so in New Zealand. The victory remains an Irish side's only win over the All Blacks and it is not surprising that each player was guaranteed free pints for life.

At a humbler level, Limerick soon will be the home of Ireland's first 50-metre swimming pool. In recent years it has hosted the World Medical Games and the UK and Ireland Corporate Games. The World Soccer Cup for Lawyers is also on the list of achievements, although it must be said a city is trying too hard when it celebrates playing host to thousands of lawyers.

The city has every right, however, to claim a rich history. Its city charter, drawn up in 1197, is the oldest in the British Isles, which includes Ireland and Britain, and King John's Castle is a feature of the Heritage Precinct. The castle, built at the beginning of the 13th century, was the stronghold of the British empire in western Ireland and its presence is a reminder of Limerick's struggles under a hated foreign power. The Heritage Precinct also includes the Castle Lane project, which is the reconstruction of a street from two centuries ago.

Downriver are the docks, which are undergoing a makeover not seen since the Vikings sailed up the Shannon in the ninth century. A handful of pubs in the city centre have also been refurbished. Some are modern and gleaming, but I preferred those with a traditional touch, such as WJ South's on O'Connell Street. South's is where Uncle Pa Keating bought the 16-year-old Frank McCourt his first pint. It looks like your average poky Irish pub from the street but opens out generously inside. It was a local for the men from the lanes of Limerick; now the clientele ranges from young professionals to older regulars. The floorboards and decor have been tastefully scrubbed up and Pa Keating would probably wonder where all the sawdust on the floor had gone. The bulldust, though, remains as thick on the ground as ever.

The Limerick banter is fun. Wit and irony are staples and all sentences are delivered with a delightful lilt. The accent is less distinctive than the sing-song carry-on in neighboring Cork but, since the publication of Angela's Ashes, the language of Limerick is among the most distinctive in the world. Which, if anyone were in any doubt, just goes to show that the pen is mightier than the pitchfork.

Struggles of the artist

When you're Jewish, Irish or Palestinian,

The question of identity is a troubling one.

Gary Younge /Guardian Newspaper

Josephine is on line four."You alright Ger?" she calls out to Limerick's late night radio DJ Gerard Hannan. She doesn't need to say who she is. Hannan recognises her voice. Like Whispering Phyllis, Giggling Breeda, Peg, who sings a song over the phone once a week, and Jim from Oola, who likes to play the listeners tunes from his gramophone, Josephine is a regular who punctuates Limerick's late-night airwaves with local banter.

It is the night of the premiere of the film, Angela's Ashes, the Pulitzer prize winning story of Frank McCourt's impoverished childhood in Limerick, and Josephine is in the mood for reminiscing. Josephine says she used to play bingo with Angela and she cannot recognise her in the wan character portrayed in the book. "She had big, fat jaws and her body was as fat as mine," she says. "I'm the same age as Frank McCourt and I don't remember cobblestones or anything like that."

And so it goes on, all night, most nights. With Hannan's encouragement - he has already made a name and is fast making a career out of criticising the book - Limerick's older citizens call to complain that their story has not been told. "Poverty is nothing to be ashamed of but he has misrepresented the innocent people of this town," says Hannan. McCourt was born in America, came to Limerick as a young boy and left for the States as a young man.

"He came here from America, he didn't like it and then he left. But a lot of people stayed and made a life there and there was a great spirit that is not reflected in Angela's Ashes which is the fruit of bitterness and begrudgery. When they [the older citizens of Limerick] look back on their childhood they did not see themselves as miserable, Irish Catholics. It's a beautifully written book. But it's not about the real Limerick. My problem with it is that he should have called it what it was: a work of fiction."

But this is more than a battle between fact and fiction. Some accuse McCourt of straying from the truth by exaggerating his impoverished upbringing in the lanes; but even more are annoyed by the fact that he remained too faithful to real life by putting local people's real names in the book and relating accounts of his mother's sex life. Many will argue, in the same sentence, that he was both too honest and not honest enough.

What is at stake here is the question of authenticity. It is a faultline that goes beyond the pages of Angela's Ashes and the streets of Limerick to the arbitrary codes and signifiers which define identity. It is the yardstick we use to determine who is and who is not eligible for inclusion in the panoply of tribes which are available to us such as class, religion, race, ethnicity and region. It provides the parameters for describing who we are, and often what we can say.

The consequences of these issues are far from academic. In Israel a debate is raging over who, for purposes of immigration, qualifies as a Jew. When the country's law of return was passed in 1950, anyone with even one Jewish grandparent had an automatic right to Israeli citizenship. Now that people of Jewish descent are pouring in from eastern Europe there is a move afoot to redefine what it is to be a Jew. "These are not people who are suffering from anti-semitism or who have any connection to the Jewish people," said Yuli Edelstein, the deputy speaker of the Knesset. If they do change the rules it could mean that people who were sufficiently Jewish to be gassed by the Nazis will not be Jewish enough to enter Israel.

You can hear it in John Prescott's tortured accounts of his own social standing. A few years ago, when he was deputy leader of the opposition, he provoked great intrigue by describing himself as "middle class". Last year, when he was on a higher salary and wielding greater power as deputy prime minister, he had returned to the toiling masses. "Make no mistake about it. I'm proud of being working class," he says. "I'm not changing my attitude or culturing my voice or even getting my grammar correct."

Last year, critics of the intellectual Edward Said raised doubts about his credentials as a refugee as a means of trying to discredit his entire body of work on the Middle East. "I had never had much respect for the intellectual integrity of Professor Said," said a spokesman for the former rightwing Israeli government. "This proves that my suspicions were not groundless." The attack put Said in the Kafkaesque situation of brandishing documents to prove that he is in fact who he has always said he was.

But there was more at stake, he believed, than his own integrity. "It is an attempt," said Said, "to pre-empt the process of return and compensation for the Palestinians. It is a way of furthering the argument that the Palestinians never belonged in Palestine... If someone like Edward Said is a liar, runs the argument, how can we believe all those peasants who say they were driven off their land?... It is part of the attempt to say that none of this actually happened." Undermine Said's authenticity, went the logic, and you undermine the credibility of the Palestinian cause.

And so it goes on. To have had the real Limerick experience you have to have stayed; to be truly Jewish you must have suffered from anti-semitism; to be working class you need bad grammar. Each assertion reveals an attempt to establish the idea that identities are fixed, universal and cohesive when in fact they are fluid, varied and disparate.

None of which is to say that the complaints about Angela's Ashes are not understandable. McCourt has dismissed his detractors' complaints by insisting that Angela's Ashes is "a memoir, not an exact history". But, since the lives of Limerick's working class rarely make it to the international stage, it is not unreasonable for them to want to see themselves portrayed accurately and sensitively.

It is a constant irritation to those on the margins that they are often ill-represented by those who make it into the mainstream. "We who survived the camp are not true witnesses," wrote Primo Levi of his time in a Nazi concentration camp. "We, the survivors, are not only a tiny but an anomalous minority. We are those who through prevarication, skill or luck never touched bottom. Those who have, and have seen the face of the Gorgon, did not return, or returned wordless."

The burden of representation on those who do emerge from desperate circumstances is a heavy one. But that is no excuse to try to deny the validity of their voice. In the case of Angela's Ashes there is, of course, no such thing as the Limerick experience but, instead, several Limerick experiences.

Nobody voted for McCourt so he is under no obligation to represent anyone. The story that McCourt told is not Limerick's but his own.

Angela's Ashes Rakes Up A Storm

Alex Renton/London Time Out

There's a cruel joke going round Limerick about the movie that's to

open in the city next Wednesday. "Worse than the film of an ordinary

miserable childhood is the film of a miserable Irish childhood, and

worse yet is the film of the miserable Irish Catholic childhood."

This will mean little to anyone who has not read Frank McCourt's

Angela's Ashes, but the millions who have ploughed through the

1990s' best-selling example of tears 'n' smiles Irish ghetto

literature will spot the parody of the book's first paragraphs.

Some people in Limerick are utterly fed up with Angela's Ashes and

its story of the McCourt children who lived in the city's slums

(excepting those who died in the family's communal bed) in the

middle of this century. There are those who don't believe Frank

McCourt's memoir, and those, such as Brendan Halligan, editor of the

Limerick Leader, who wish Angela, the Ashes and everyone else would

just go away. The book is a ghost haunting modern Limerick life: "It

overshadows everything."

Arguments over the veracity of McCourt's account have, in the three

year's since publication, caused endless fuss. The Limerick Leader

is well-used to receiving letters that point out flaws in the

McCourt children's saga, and the filming has touched nerves again.

"Frank McCourt's book," said a recent editorial wearily, "generated

more controversy in Limerick than anything since the opening of the

interpretative centre in King John's Castle." And that was more than

six years ago.

Nearly 200 Limerick people have undertaken to demonstrate outside

the screening, in defence of their city's good name. That's hardly

surprising - for Limerick, her cruel streets, hard-hearted

shopkeepers and hypocritical clergy, is the chief villain, the prime

child abuser of Angela's Ashes.

Brendan Halligan says: "It is difficult to understand how a gloomy,

depressing and backward look at a make-believe Limerick would

necessarily show today's real Limerick in a kindly light," he wrote,

opposing the campaign to get the film to come home. "Good riddance

to it."

There's no question that Limerick has changed since McCourt's day.

The Irish boom and economic aid from Brussels have seen the city's

slums transformed - indeed the city is quite proud that Alan

Parker's team were unable to find a suitable tenement "lane" for

filming in Limerick, (they had to build their own slum in a car park

in Dublin instead). John O'Regan, who organises Angela's Ashes tours

at £4-a-head for fans who arrive weepily from across the world,

enjoys showing off the business centre and apartment blocks that now

dominate the old red-light district of the Shannon docks. Even

Sutton's Coalyard, outside which Angela and her sons scavenged for

fuel, is now Jury's Inn, a "posh" hotel.

But it is not the fact that Parker and McCourt's Limerick maligns

today's Limerick that will cause the demonstrations outside the

Dooradoyle Omniplex on Wednesday. Those will be staged by the people

who simply don't believe the story told in Angela's Ashes. "A few

fanatics and self-publicists" is how sensible Limerick dismisses

them (though sensible Limerick asks not to be named - it's a small

city). But the anti-McCourtists include men who were at school with

McCourt. Men like Paddy Malone, who, when Frank McCourt returned to

Limerick for a book-signing, asked the author if he remembered him

and then ripped the book in half, shouting: "You're a disgrace to

Ireland, the Church and your mother." Malone is now threatening to

sue McCourt.

There is, in fact, a mini-industry in getting at Frank McCourt. Two

contemporaries have published their own accounts of their happier

Limerick childhoods, while a local bookshop owner and disc-jockey,

Gerard Hannan, has published Ashes - a "true story of two brothers

growing up in the Limerick Lanes". Next week he will publish a

sequel to that book, just as McCourt has published 'Tis, his own

sequel to Angela's Ashes. The new book is cheekily titled 'Tis in Me

Ass - authentic Limerick street slang, apparently. Hannan, whose

hounding of McCourt has taken him from US TV news to Melvyn Bragg's

South Bank Show, says he is simply attempting to right a grievous

wrong done to Limerick's reputation and history. "You will have been

led to understand that I am a two-headed lunatic," he says gravely.

"But there are hundreds of people behind me, and I have letters from

across the world to prove it."

Such disputes are part of the territory - an almost inevitable

after-effect of making money out of live history is that others who

were there too will stand up to argue about what really happened.

And, of course, McCourt has many defenders. His editor at

HarperCollins, Philip Gwyn Jones, follows the common argument that

McCourt's story is a memoir, it doesn't claim to be autobiography.

Behind the subjective reporting is greater truth. "People come up to

Frank, who were either there, or knew someone who was at that time

And say, "Oh, Frank, you've got it all wrong: Mrs. So and so didn't

live at number 7, it was number 5." Maybe he did get little facts

wrong, but it is a work of non-fiction, and he has written it as

true as he can remember. Of course we support Frank's interpretation

as plausible and authentic. But the truth looks different to every

different pair of eyes. That's the nature of historical truth."

The problem for the pro-McCourt camp is that their man's mistakes

are just the one's that are likely to cause maximum offence among

the people of Limerick, and the guardians of the truth. Queuing at

that Limerick book-signing was another contemporary from the

Limerick Lanes, Willie Harold. Mr. Harold, now dead, appears in the

book at his first confession, telling a priest how he has sinned,

looking at his sister's naked body. The problem is, Mr. Harold never had a sister. Many older Limerick people are incensed at the

portrait of Angela herself. There's no doubt that Mrs. McCourt would

not like her son's portrayal. Shortly before she died, in 1981, she

was taken to see Frank and brother Malachy perform a stage show

about their early lives. She stormed out, shouting: "It didn't

happen that way. It's all a pack of lies."

Other stories have emerged that throw doubt on McCourt's

reliability. The clergy of 1940s Limerick - where "you couldn't

throw a brick without hitting a priest" - come particularly poorly

out of the book. Recently McCourt told the Los Angeles Times that

the film-makers weren't allowed to use any of Limerick's churches,

because local clergy, led by the Bishop of Limerick, opposed the

film. When the Limerick journalists investigated this claim they

found that only one church, that of the Redemptorists, had refused

to co-operate with filming. The Bishop's office had gone out of

their way to help - a fact that the film's producer's confirmed.

No one in Limerick denies that there was awful poverty in the city

60 years ago, but further investigation has led them to wonder just

how poor the McCourts really were. Some people have pointed out how

fat Angela and some of the children were, while the Limerick Leader

dug up photographs of McCourt in his boy scout's uniform. Scouting

was expensive and usually for middle-class boys - "Is this the

picture of misery?" asked the newspaper.

Perhaps the most sensible verdict comes from another Limerick

contemporary, a John Conran who lives now in Birmingham. He wrote to

the Limerick Leader after reading McCourt's book, to say how much he

had enjoyed it. " I lived in Limerick at the time. I had nine

sisters and one brother. I did not feel all that misery. I enjoyed

my schooldays at St Munchin's CBS. We had the Shannon and the hills

on our doorstep. The problem with the McCourts was not Limerick, the

Church or the priests. The father was an alcoholic. He failed in New

York, the promised land. He would fail in any city - and did."

John O'Regan, who on his Angela's Ashes tours daily watches people

from all over the world weep as they remember the sufferings of

their own childhoods, says he knows Frank McCourt was not lying.

"I've seen enough people to know that Frank spoke for all of them.

What he wrote was his truth: Angela's Ashes is a mirror of those

times."

Additional reporting by Gita Mendis

Rising from the ashes

Anne Molloy/Irish News

Frank McCourt wrote in Angela's Ashes that there was only one thing

worse than "a miserable Irish childhood" and that was "a miserable

Irish Catholic childhood."

It was such strong and ultimately disparaging statements that made

McCourt's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel unforgettable and for it's

detractors unforgivable.

For the three years since its publication Angela's Ashes has

continued to cause rancor in his childhood home of Limerick where

there is a clear division between those who would like to pillory

the McCourts and those, like the former mayor, who want to give them

the freedom of the city.

"Lies, lies, lies, lies," decried one Paddy Malone, who attended the

same school as the young McCourt, and claimed that Frank

"prostitutes his mother" in the book.

Another self-appointed McCourt opponent is Radio Limerick presenter

Gerard Hannan who sees Angela's Ashes as a straightforward attack on

the city and its people and is publishing his own riposte ‘Tis in Me

Ass’ a play on McCourt's second autobiographical work ‘Tis.’

McCourt has at times tried to distance himself from the continuing

row and said that the book was not about the city "it was about

poverty."

But that is too much of an oversimplification by the author as a lot

of the anger from McCourt (and his younger brother Malachy) is

directed not at their alcoholic father but their downtrodden mother.

McCourt implies that Angela takes the boys to live at her cousin's

home and sleeps with him in return for a roof over their heads when

Malachy finally deserts them, apparently for good.

The adolescent Frank makes it clear (as does his brother Malachy in

his own autobiography A Monk Swimming) that he cannot deal with the

situation and it would appear that they never forgave their mother

for this (though this does not mean they didn't love her) and they

seem to have made their peace with their father before he died.

To outsiders this seems strange because Malachy (Snr) would appear

to have been at the root of most of the McCourt's difficulties ñ or

as one Limerick contemporary has pointed out "we were just as poor

but the difference was our father didn't drink."

Malachy McCourt (portrayed by outstanding British actor Robert

Carlyle in the film) was originally from Toome in Co Antrim and was

often decried by his wife's family as the next best thing to a

Presbyterian, particularly because of the way his hair stood up: "He

had Protestant hair."

He would be pleased to know that in some respects little has changed

in the intervening 50 years as an article about the film in the

Limerick Leader assured its readers recently.

"The specter that haunts Limerick is not that of Angela or any other

Limerick person but of her alcoholic Ulster husband."

The geographical pinpointing of the source of the problem is

revealing in itself and goes a long way to rebuff the notion that

modern Limerick is at peace with itself and its new found wealth.

It's often the hurry to forget the bad memories of an impoverished

past that reveals the insecurity of the nouveau riche.

Many of the older generation in Limerick (as elsewhere in Ireland)

are not keen to talk about the difficulties of past times and the

younger are too busy making money to care.

As Frank McCourt said: "My mother hated me uncovering the past: the

only place for confessions is to a priest, she thought: she wanted

curtains drawn over all the poverty and sordidness."

And he admitted that writing the book was "similar to cleaning out

the sewers, dredging up that stuff."

But he didn't just sit down and write the book after he retired from

teaching in America, he was scribbling bits for years though he

didn't complete it sooner "because all those years I was too busy

marking other people's essays. And the timing wasn't right. My

mother had to die and I think I had to grow up. And it took me a

long time."

The fact that he waited until his mother's death before publicising

their life together at least indicates that McCourt was not

indifferent to his mother's feelings despite what his detractors

would have us believe.

When it came to filming Angela's Ashes last year in Limerick there

was some nervousness on the part of director Alan Parker, who was

aware of the vocal opposition in some parts of the city to the book.

"It's an exaggeration to say that there was enmity towards us making

the film in the city where it is based, but I think it's fair to say

that there was some trepidation on our part, a feeling that we were

not entirely welcome but that could have been my own personal

paranoia."

Parker, in his personal diary of the filming, is however critical of

the churches in Limerick who refused to let them film though he

admits they were treated "cordially". Interior church scenes were

eventually filmed in Dublin and Parker does reveal the problems for

Churches of having a "hundred film crew noisily go about their

business particularly for a film which takes place in a period

before Vatican II."

He also reveals the truism of the old adage of never working "with

animals or children" as Angela’s Ashes involved working with dozens

of children who portray not only the McCourts but their

contemporaries at different stage over a 15-year period.

"I have to say that these were the most difficult scenes I've ever

directed with young children, and I've done a considerable amount of

filming in this area. Although a shrieking child might be what

you're after for the scene, you have to keep reminding yourself that

it's not just the illusion of film and that, close by, behind the

set, stands the real mother of this small child, suffering

considerably herself as her offspring cries real tears for the

camera."

Parker, who’s numerous films include that other Irish-based success

The Commitments, however is generous in his praise of Newry actor

Michael Legge who portrays Frank McCourt as an older adolescent.

"He has great subtlety and application and, as with all good actors

who make things look easy, there is a fierce intelligence at work."

See you in court, McCourt

For local radio host/journalist and author

Gerry Hannan 'Angela's Ashes' is a vicious slur on his city

Rob Brown/The Guardian (UK)

Frank McCourt must have done scores of interviews to plug 'Tis, the

sequel to Angela's Ashes, his global bestseller about growing up

dirt poor in the priest-ridden, rain-sodden slums of Limerick. But

all these encounters put together could not have been anywhere near

as painful as the prime-time television appearance he made back in

his native Ireland recently.

It wasn't Pat Kenny, host of The Late Late Show, who gave him a hard

time. The trouble came from a member of the Dublin studio audience.

"You have been peddling lies about Limerick," the man bellowed into

the microphone. "You are a liar, a self-confessed liar." McCourt

could only raise his arms to the heavens and appeal to his accuser

in his strange but weirdly soothing mid-Atlantic accent: "I don't

know why you're so obsessed with me. Why don't you get a life and go

and do something?"

His plea fell on deaf ears, for a large part of Gerry Hannan's life

is now devoted to stirring up controversy around McCourt. His

personal crusade to "set the record straight" will crank up a gear

next week when the movie version of Angela's Ashes rolls on to

cinema screens. Hannan, who combines local broadcasting with running

a second-hand bookshop in Limerick, has even penned two books as

direct ripostes to McCourt's memoirs. The first was called simply

Ashes. The second, due for release next week, is even more

opportunistically entitled 'Tis In Me Ass, an expression straight

from the language of the Lanes, the now notorious backstreets on the

north side of Limerick where McCourt endured his miserable childhood.

The main outlet for Hannan's literary vendetta isn't his books ñ

which will never rival their targets in the bestseller lists ñ but

the late-night phone-in programme he presents on Limerick 95. The

radio station provides a regular platform for critics of McCourt,

who seem to be both numerous and vocal in the author's native city.

No one is getting terribly worked up about 'Tis, which tells of

young Frank's escape from Limerick to America and what he found

there. Hannan's tribute to "the people who didn't run off to America

but instead stayed at home to help build a city" doesn't pack

anywhere near the same animus as Ashes, which was a far more pointed

attack on Angela's Ashes.

According to his arch critic, McCourt's upbringing wasn't anywhere

near as brutal as he makes out. "When you read Angela's Ashes, it's

misery, misery, misery all the way," says Hannan. "That's not how it

is remembered by anyone else who lived there. Of course there was a

lot of poverty and suffering, but there was also a great spirit to

the place. People helped each other through the hard times." For

him, the situation was best summed up by an elderly listener who

called in to say: "Ger, everyone loves Frank McCourt except the

people who knew him. And everyone loves Angela's Ashes except the

people who know the truth."

Angela's Ashes is a particularly searing account of the author's

childhood in the Lanes of Limerick, depicted as a living hell where

he and his brothers (those who didn't die in the cot) begged for

food while neighbours looked on with cruel indifference and the

local Catholic clergy humiliated the most wretched members of its

flock.

The book, which won the 1997 Pulitzer prize for biography, begins

with this now famous opening passage: "When I look back on my

childhood I wonder how I survived it at all. It was, of course, a

miserable childhood: the happy childhood is hardly worth your while.

Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish

childhood, and worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood."

Ger, as his fans affectionately address him, seems a bit of a local

hero in Limerick. When we met up in the city's Bewley's café

(Dublin's famous coffee house has become a fast-growing chain),

several people came up to tell him what a grand job he was doing or

to alert him to some local injustice he should sort out on the

airwaves. Hannan claims to have received a hero's welcome after his

showdown with McCourt on The Late Late Show. "I think they wanted

his head brought back to Limerick on a plate," he recalled, beaming.

He admits to having got a frostier reception at the University of

Limerick, which conferred an honorary degree on McCourt two years

ago. "I know it annoys the intelligentsia to see some little

gobshite stand up to the great author, but I'm only concerned about

the common people and they're on my side."

Being only 40 himself, Hannan cannot draw upon his own experiences

to contradict McCourt's recollections of the 1940s, far less the

1930s. But several of his relatives are contemporaries of McCourt,

and it was they who first raised his suspicions about the book. His

late uncle Martin, who went to school with Frank McCourt, fed him a

lot of the background information for Ashes, which was billed as

"The real memoirs of two boys from the Limerick Lanes". Paddy

Hannan, his 74-year-old father, was particularly affronted by

McCourt's portrayal of his mother, Angela, whom he remembers as the

angel of the Lanes. "He makes her out to be good-for-nothing. Anyone

who cuts their own mammy down like that deserves nothing."

McCourt is also accused of scandalising the family of Teresa Carmody

by telling the world that he had sex with her just days before she

died of tuberculosis. McCourt maintains that she never existed and

that the name was made up.

Such explanations have failed to silence his detractors, including

those on the local newspaper The Limerick Leader. At one point it

published a half-page of photographs showing McCourt as a member of

St Joseph's Boy Scouts. Pointing out that this particular scout

troop was regarded as the Elite of Limerick, the headline asked: "Is

this the picture of misery?"

McCourt, a handsome, snow-haired figure who penned his memoirs after

teaching for many years in New York high schools, tried to laugh off

such assaults. "Begrudgers," he told the Boston Globe. "Where would

Ireland be without them?" He dismissed the complaints as

"peripheral", describing Angela's Ashes as "a memoir, not an exact

history". He has owned up to one falsehood. In the book, schoolmate

Willie Harold is depicted walking to his first confession

"whispering about his big sin, that he looked at his sister's naked

body". Willie Harold never had a sister, a point he brought to

McCourt's attention when, in the advanced stages of cancer, he

queued at a book-signing to set the record straight. McCourt claims

to have settled the matter amicably by granting his old chum a free

copy. It is impossible to verify this, as Harold has since died.

He'll have to do a lot more than sign a free copy to silence Gerry

Hannan, who is plainly basking in the limelight of his vendetta. In

the back office of his bookstore he has a fat file containing all

the stories his claims have generated on both sides of the Atlantic.

He also got to vent his spleen on The South Bank Show when it

profiled Frank McCourt recently. Is he obsessive? Gerry Hannan

doesn't think so. "I've got a lot of other things in my life, but I

do have a tremendous sense of loyalty to my listeners, who inundated

me for weeks and weeks with their heartfelt complaints about Frank

McCourt."

Whatever, the feud will enter a new chapter as Alan Parker's film of

Angela's Ashes hits the screens. The producers of The Late Late Show

would doubtless be keen to stage a second bout. Whether McCourt will

allow himself to be ambushed again is highly doubtful. Hannan, who

was carefully primed by an RTE researcher for his first ever

appearance on prime time television, is certainly up for a rematch.

"I don't just want to eyeball him in a television studio," Hannan

told The Independent. "I want Frank McCourt to take me to court,

where the truth about his book will come out for the whole world to

see."

Limerick, Rising From 'Ashes'

A bittersweet memoir is luring people to this once-grim Irish City.

They're in for a surprise.

By K.C. Summers/The Washington Post

Limerick's Windmill Street is a postman's nightmare. Its small,

two-story stucco row houses are numbered 25, 2, 41, 1, 42 . . .

there are three No. 1's alone. But the house I'm looking for doesn't

seem to have a number at all. Painted pale yellow with a green door,

its only distinctive feature is a stuffed Garfield the Cat stuck in

the upstairs window.

It's an ordinary house in an ordinary city, so unexceptional that no

one would give it a second glance. Yet millions of people know it

intimately, because it's one of the places Frank McCourt, author of

the best-selling memoir "Angela's Ashes," lived when he was growing

up poor and desperate in the slums of Limerick, Ireland, during the

1930s and '40s. This is what it was like on the McCourts' first

night in this house:

Dad and Mam lay at the head of the bed, Malachy and I at the bottom,

the twins wherever they could find comfort . . . Then Eugene sat up,

screaming, tearing at himself . . . when Dad leaped from the bed and

turned on the gaslight we saw the fleas, leaping, jumping, fastened

to our flesh. We slapped at them and slapped but they hopped from

body to body, hopping, biting. We tore at the bites till they bled.

We jumped from the bed, the twins crying, Mam moaning, Oh, Jesus,

will we have no rest!

It's hard to reconcile the misery depicted in McCourt's book with

that Garfield up in the window. But in a way, the stuffed cat says

it all. The terrible days of life in Limerick that McCourt wrote

about so eloquently is gone, and good riddance to them. Yet it's a

measure of how moving his book is -- and how much things have

changed in Ireland -- that people are coming back to Limerick to see

how it was.

Frank McCourt, with his evocative, funny-sad memoir, has done the

unimaginable: He's turned Limerick into a hot tourist destination.

This is a bit like drawing tourists to the United States to spend a

week in Toledo. Unfairly or not, Ireland's fourth-largest city has

long had a reputation as a gritty, somewhat grim place, with few

attractions for visitors beyond its proximity to Shannon

International Airport. People tended to use it as a starting and

ending point when they visited Ireland, but few spent any time there.

It's easy to see why. This isn't the Ireland of leprechauns and

blarney stones; it's a working city -- computers, manufacturing --

without the slick trappings of tourism. Which is precisely why it's

worth visiting. It hasn't been Disneyfied. There is no Frank

McCourt T-shirt shops. The little yellow house on Windmill Street

hasn't been turned into an Angela's Ashes B&B; Yet.

"Angela's Ashes" long ago went from being merely popular to

something of a cult object. It's been widely praised for its

luminous prose, selling close to 2 million copies in little over a

year, and topping the bestseller lists since its publication. It's

won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award,

and was voted Book of the Year for 1997 by the American Booksellers

Association.

The book is not for the squeamish. In fact, as McCourt says, it's a

wonder that he survived to tell the tale. He was born in New York of

immigrant parents who moved the family back to Ireland when he was

4. Big mistake. They had already lost one child in New York, and two

more would die in Limerick. The father drank away his wages (when he

worked at all), the mother begged for charity and the children

mostly fended for themselves as the family moved from one squalid,

flea-ridden flat to another. A number of villains emerge: members of

the Catholic clergy, sadistic schoolmasters, callous social workers

and -- not the least -- "the gray city of Limerick and the river

that kills."

It sounds horrible, depressing, nothing you'd willingly want to read

about -- much less visit. But people are. "Throngs of them," sighs

the bartender at the venerable W.J. South pub, newly famous as the

favorite watering hole of Frank McCourt's father. "Busloads of them."

"Oh yes indeed, it's been quite popular," says Breda Bourke,

supervisor of the Limerick tourist information office. "It started

off with Americans and now we're getting a lot of inquiries from the

Germans and the Japanese. It's very, very popular. It's bringing

people to the city that we might not otherwise have."

Liam O'Hanlon, chairman of the Limerick Tourist Trade Association,

has led walking tours of the city for years. Until recently, his

routine was unvarying: King John's Castle, St. Mary's Cathedral and

other highlights of Limerick's medieval district. "It was the

historical things that people were interested in," he says. "Now,

suddenly they're walking in with `Angela's Ashes,' wanting to know

where the lanes are. They expect to see what Frank McCourt has

written about -- but what he's written about no longer exists."

Well, not exactly. In addition to South's pub, quite a few sites

from the book remain, including the Leamy National School, the

People's Park, a slew of exquisite old churches where the young

Frank frequently sought refuge, and the St. Vincent de Paul Society

town house where his mother, Angela, queued up for charity. But as

O'Hanlon emphasizes to visitors, the slums McCourt described so

unflinchingly are gone, cleared away during the 1950s and '60s.

The Irish economy is booming, thanks in part to the recent influx of

European Union funds, and Limerick is no exception. An urban renewal

project begun in the 1980s has had dramatic results. Construction is

everywhere -- hotels, apartment blocks, pubs, restaurants. Blocks of

once-elegant, 19th-century Georgian row houses are being lovingly

restored. There's an undeniable air of prosperity. On a bright fall

weekend, the downtown streets are jammed, the shops and restaurants

packed.

Down by Arthur's Quay on the banks of the Shannon, there are posh

stores, antiques shops and a gleaming new tourist information

center. The prestigious Hunt Museum, with an impressive collection

of antiquities, recently moved here from its former digs on the

outskirts of the city. Lovely old churches abound, and they're not

even locked, should you be seized by a sudden desire to confess your

sins.

When the walls of Limerick were torn down and the city was rebuilt

in the mid-18th century, this area became the city's focal point. By

the time Frank McCourt was knocking around town, the elegant

Victorian buildings had become tenements and Arthur's Quay was known

as a desperate place.

Everyone in Limerick knows these houses are old and might fall down

at any minute. Mam often says, I don't want any of ye going down to

Arthur's Quay and if I find ye there I'll break yeer faces. The

people down there are wild and ye could get robbed and killed.

Now the pendulum has swung again, and the upscale shopping mall

there is full of Nike-clad teenagers and their equally well-dressed

elders. You can buy a boombox, or a bottle of fine wine, or a

hand-knit sweater to die for. In Quinnsworth's, a supermarket as

bright and garish as any Giant or Safeway, I wandered down aisles

stocked with 12 different kinds of marmalade and more brands of

chocolate than I even knew existed. There I bought a bag of Odlums

flour, which a local had recommended to me as "quite brilliant"

("brilliant" being the Irish word for anything great). I was hoping

to re-create the taste of Irish bread when I returned home.

Ah. Irish bread. I'd become be sotted with it during my stay. Truth

to tell, I'd been pleasantly surprised by Irish food in general. Of

course, a "full Irish breakfast" can be a somewhat alarming sight

first thing in the morning, with lots of fried everything. But many

places serve fresh ingredients now, and the seafood, especially, is

delicious. At dinner that night, I headed back to Arthur's Quay and

feasted on fillet of sea bream with crispy leeks and a smoked salmon

butter sauce at a cool neighborhood restaurant called the Green

Onion. Not all my meals in Limerick were as memorable as that one,

but it's safe to say that Irish dining has successfully made it into

the '90s.

It wasn't just the food and the shops that drew me back to the

narrow streets of Arthur's Quay again and again. It was the history.

Limerick is oozing with it. You can be walking down the street,

thinking about that hand-knit sweater you just tried on, then look

up to find yourself passing a 13th-century castle. England's King

John ordered this fortress built in 1212 to guard the entrance to

the city. Today, you can climb the tower's steep stone staircase,

peer through the narrow slitted windows and imagine yourself

shooting arrows at the passersby below. (Hard to get a good angle!)

When you finally reach the top, you can stride across the

battlements for commanding views of the city, and scan the

approaching traffic on the Thomond Bridge. Except instead of varlets

on horseback, there are cars whizzing by, and people on bicycles.

From the castle, it's a short walk to St. Mary's Cathedral,

Limerick's oldest surviving building. Built in 1172, it's famous for

its 15th-century choir stalls, made of dark oak with fanciful

carvings. Outside, there are towering old trees, a wonderful,

atmospheric cemetery with crumbling Irish crosses, and a bench where

you can ponder your puny existence.

As a backdrop to all this, the River Shannon is a constant -- and

increasingly lovely -- presence. For years the city turned its back

on the river, and has only recently rediscovered it. Now there are

waterfront parks and benches and monuments, and rowing sculls and

boathouses. It's a delightful scene on a quiet Sunday morning, with

people riding by on bicycles, and strolling couples admiring the

swans -- yes, swans -- gliding on the river.

Above all, there are kids. Most adults of childbearing age seem to

have at least two or three children attached to them. The streets of

Limerick are clogged with rosy babies in strollers, pudgy toddlers,

freckle-faced grade-school kids in parochial school uniforms,

exuberant packs of teenagers.

It's a far cry from the vision of the city summoned by Frank

McCourt. And still . . . Remnants of his Limerick remain, in mute

testimony to harder times.

Tour guide O'Hanlon is used to getting a bit of flak from the

residents of Limerick. The first time he visited the former McCourt

house on Windmill Street, he says, a woman came out of her house

with her hands on her hips. "She saw that I had the book and she

asked if I'd read it. I said I had. `Isn't it filth?' she asked." He

shrugs. You run into that kind of attitude a lot on the "Angela's

Ashes" circuit.

Just a few blocks away on Hartstonge Street, past rows of Georgian

town houses and offices and something called the Victoria Club

Leisure Complex, is a somewhat forbidding, Gothic-looking red-brick

building with a crenellated roof. This was Leamy's National School,

home to cruel and/or demented schoolmasters and legions of barefoot,

underfed students.

There are seven masters in Leamy's National School, and they all

have leather straps, canes, blackthorn sticks. They hit you with the

sticks on the shoulders, the back, the legs, and, especially, the

hands. If they hit you on the hands it's called a slap. They hit you

if you're late, if you have a leaky nib on your pen, if you laugh,

if you talk, and if you don't know things.

They hit you if you don't know why God made the world, if you don't

know the patron saint of Limerick, if you can't recite the Apostles'

Creed, if you can't add 19 to 47, if you can't subtract 19 from 47,

if you don't know the chief towns and products of the 32 counties of

Ireland, if you can't find Bulgaria on the wall map . . .

The school houses offices now -- a tailor shop, a brass plaque

company. Inside, it's carpeted and renovated, with not a trace of a

classroom remaining. A man with a tape measure around his neck comes

out of the tailor's, sees us and rolls his eyes. Have there been a

lot of "Angela's Ashes" pilgrims poking around? "There have." Has he

read the book? "I haven't." (Nobody in Ireland says "yes" or "no.")

"A lot of people in Limerick are a bit sour over it," he explains,

adding, "The book's got it all wrong. 'Twasn't like that. Not atall."

Right next door is another "Ashes" landmark: the four-story,

red-brick town house of the St. Vincent de Paul Society, where

Frank's mother, Angela, queued up for charity.

Mam goes to the St. Vincent de Paul Society to see if there's any

chance of getting furniture. The man says he'll give us a docket for

a table, two chairs, and two beds . . . She wipes her eyes on her

sleeves and asks the man if the beds we're getting are secondhand.

He says of course they are, and she says she's very worried about

sleeping in beds someone might have died in, especially if they had

the consumption. The man says, I'm very sorry, but beggars can't be

choosers.

The society is still a source of clothing and furniture for

Limerick's poor, but "it's much more user-friendly today," says

O'Hanlon. "You don't find people queuing up outside anymore."

Onward, to the People's Park, where Frank took his small brothers to

distract them from their hunger. Even on a rainy day it's inviting,

with well-tended rose gardens, a fanciful Victorian drinking

fountain and the greenest grass I've ever seen. I end up coming back

here several times during my stay -- it's such an appealing place,

full of all manner of kids, guys kicking soccer balls, dog-walkers,

mums with prams, people on benches. On the facing Pery Square, a row

of striking Georgian row houses with elaborate fanlights is being

renovated.

Down Barrington Street, past doctors' and solicitors' offices with

lovely painted doors -- Limerick has great doors -- is Barrack Hill,

site of another McCourt residence.

We move to Roden Lane on top of a place called Barrack Hill. There

are six houses on one side of the lane, one on the opposite side.

The houses are called two up, two down, two rooms on the top, two on

the bottom. Our house is at the end of the lane, the last of the

six. Next to our door is a small shed, a lavatory, and next to that

a stable.

Roden Lane, where the McCourts shared that single lavatory with the

rest of the block, is gone now, but St. Joseph's Church, where the

young Frank received his First Communion and Confirmation, is a

looming presence. That's where Frank applied to be an altar boy, and

there, visible through the white wrought-iron fence, is the door

that was slammed in his face.

Perhaps Frank found more comfort in the massive, century-old

Redemptorist Church on South Circular Road, a dark and beautiful

refuge, with flickering votive candles, an intricate mosaic-tiled

floor and eye-popping, elaborately gilded alcoves. Farther north, on

Henry Street, is the huge Franciscan Church where Frank prayed to

his patron saint, Francis of Assisi. With its huge pillared front it

looks more like the Supreme Court than a place of worship, but

inside it has the same welcoming feeling and lovely smell of incense

and candle wax. Old women click their rosary beads as shoppers pop

in, genuflect and say a quick prayer. Anyone raised on modern

ecclesiastical architecture and streamlined statuary will never want

to leave.

You can't escape "Angela's Ashes" in Limerick. Everyone has an

opinion about the book, and is only too eager to share it. Store

clerks, waitresses, taxi drivers, people in pubs -- if they aren't

related to someone in the book, they went to school with them or, at

the very least, know one of the characters.

Sabine Sheehan, a desk clerk at Jurys Inn on Lower Mallow Street, in

the dockside area where the young Frank once scrounged for bits of

coal, watches all the "Ashes" hubbub with amusement. She's a

descendant of Ab Sheehan, Angela's brother, and her stepmother is

related to one of the masters at Leamy School. "The book's prompted

a lot of peoples' memories," Sheehan says. "People say he has no

right to dredge all this up, but I wouldn't agree. That's the way

'twas, and that's the way 'twas."

What people think of the book depends on their age, says Liam

O'Hanlon. "Younger people have no personal knowledge, and accept the

book as one person's recollections of his childhood as he remembers

it. What he's writing about is just another part of Limerick

history. But there are a lot of people in Limerick in their late

sixties who see the book as a challenge to a way of life that they

remember with rose-tinted glasses. He's confronting them with what

they don't want to hear."

Indeed, while opinion about the book is divided, the naysayers may

have the edge in Limerick. When McCourt comes back to the city for

book tours, irate residents are there to meet him, challenging his

memory and questioning his anecdotes. "Every time he comes to

Limerick and puts his head above the parapet, there's someone firing

at him," says O'Hanlon.

"There's a lot of begrudgery about it in the home town," agrees

Eddie Daly, a clerk in O'Mahony's bookstore on O'Connell Street,

where a table in front is piled high with something called "Ashes,"

a copycat memoir by Gerard Hannan. "That book was written as a

retort to `Angela's Ashes,' " Daly says, "but it doesn't have the

same feeling. Hannan has an ax to grind."

While "Angela's Ashes" continues to sell well, Daly says, "it's

probably selling better on a nationwide basis. A lot of people in

Limerick are still a bit tender. But that's the Irish -- we're a

nation of begrudgers. You see one of your own doing well, you want

to give him some slag."

But even if you can't look at "Angela's Ashes" objectively, Daly

adds, "you still have to admire it as a fine piece of work. Times

were hard, but such was the situation for the vast majority of

people in Limerick at the time. I'm a native myself, and I really

enjoyed it. The humor is amazing. He's a great storyteller."

If the bone-crushing poverty of Frank McCourt's Limerick is gone,

certain things in Ireland are eternal. On a rainy fall afternoon,

waves of mist roll in from the River Shannon, down the Dock Road and

through the streets and lanes. It's a perfect day to wander into

South's pub and curl up with a pint.

South's seems ageless with its ancient mahogany wood, marble bar,

etched-glass partitions and cozy alcoves called "snugs," but "Och,

'tis changed," says a guy nursing a Guinness. In McCourt's day, he

says, it was a third of the size. " 'Tis an old establishment. There

were terrible characters from the docks, before. It's all different

now."

But it doesn't take long to find someone who grew up with Frank McCourt.

"The lanes were full of rats," Jerry, a South's regular, is saying.

"Full of rats they were. We'd wait for the full moon to come out.

We'd put our boots on and tuck our pants legs in our boots, and a

gang of us would go out. I'd kill about 80 on a good night -- hit

'em with a stick. That was our entertainment."

Has he read "Angela's Ashes"? Big grin. "I'm waiting for someone to

give it to me."

George, over on the next stool, went to school with Frank's brother

Malachy -- they had the same master, "Hoppy" O'Halloran. "You'd be

frightened for your life," he said. "He'd run after you with a big

stick. He'd bring you up and give you six slaps. Really hard, now.

He'd leave Malachy in charge when he went away. Now Malachy, he was

a very clever fellow . . ."

Times were tough, they say, but happy. "You could leave your door

open," Jerry says. "There were very good people in the lanes -- very

neighborly. Everyone looked after one another. They were grand

people. You could always get food from someone. You could get a bun

and a bit of tripe . . ."

"I didn't like what Frank said about where we were living," George

says. "It's not true. We weren't that badly off. I wish him luck,

but I don't agree with the stuff he put in that book. But he's got

his money now."

"Frank's a decent enough fellow," Jerry says. "I don't begrudge him

his success. He survived, and that's it in a nutshell, isn't it?"

LIMERICK BURNS OVER 'ANGELA'

By Mike Meyer /Chicago Tribune

Michael O'Donnell is not your average tour guide.

Gerard Hannan is not your average bookshop

owner. Frank McCourt is not your average memoir writer. Yet the

three men's fates have crossed in Limerick, an average Irish town.

And none of them, city included, were prepared for the attention

that "Angela's Ashes" would bring them from outside the community,

and the controversy it would create from within.

I spent the first weeks of January touring the great writers'

environments of Ireland -- Joyce and Shaw's Dublin; Heaney's Ulster

coast; Yeats' Sligo. Remarkable about each of these areas was the

preservation of ambience; you could feel what the land coaxed out of

these men and onto the page. Yet Ireland treasures and promotes its

writers beyond the postcard stand, as well, and you'll find ample

sections of Irish Literature, Irish History and Irish Politics

fronting bookseller's shelves, including the works of Frank McCourt.

As I traveled, McCourt's name increasingly cropped up in the Irish

Times and Independent national newspapers more than any other writer

did. More than Bono even, who weighed in frequently with editorials

about forgiving Third World debt or U2 receiving the freedom of the

city award in Dublin in March. For the top half of January, McCourt

vied only with Gerry Adams for most-mentioned celebrity, due to the

premiering of the film version of "Angela's Ashes." On the film's

opening day, it was the Independent's front page story, right

underneath a headline declaring "Pope planning to step down next

year."

Another writer's stomping grounds had turned tourist attraction, I

figured, and so I headed to Limerick for the film's opening and to

walk the streets that had etched themselves for half a century in

McCourt's mind.

But as I made my way south to Limerick, another set of stories about

"Angela's Ashes" began to appear in the UK and Irish press. They

told of a Limerick writer/bookshop owner/popular radio host who

publicly challenged the accuracy of McCourt's memoir and, thus, its

merits for receiving the Pulitzer for non-fiction. The stories began

small, but as the film's premier drew nearer, they ballooned to the

point where the man became a household name and saw himself being

discussed at the premiere press conference by director Alan Parker

and star Emily Watson. Within a week, Gerard Hannan had become both

bete noir and celebrity, Limerick's second-most-famous writer.

Arriving in the city, I walked across the Sarsfield Bridge over the

River Shannon. The description of the river was the only passage I

remembered from "Angela's Ashes," about how his mother could hear

the river sing. The water surged quick under my feet, slicing the

town in two, running the color of Guinness, all black flow and tan

swells. It sang a song of urgency, and the first thought that struck

me as I looked at Limerick was: This is a very pretty place.

A footpath edged the bank and I followed it west toward the ocean. A

pair of swans swam calmly toward me, and past. There were no ashes

here, only tranquility and the opposite bank lined with luxury

hotels. I asked a few passersby what they thought of "Angela's

Ashes" and about the controversy, but their responses were

noncommittal. "Good book, oh yeah, we listen to Hannan's show." This

did not make good copy. Drastic action was needed.

I checked in at the gleaming modern tourist information center at

Arthur's Quay Park on the southern bank of the Shannon. The smartly

dressed agent behind the desk provided me with a Web address to find

current information, outlined the historical sites of King's Island,

and pointed me to shelves full of curios of the "Kiss Me I'm Irish"

ilk to carry back home. Nary a mention of Limerick history or

"Angela's Ashes." I pulled out my dogeared copy of the book and

started plotting the street names McCourt mentions onto my city map.

The going wasn't easy. Limerick has changed, and with it, her place

names. I approached the agent again. "I sort of had more of a

walking tour in mind," I told her. "Something about true Limerick

past, like King John's Castle over there and the Treaty Stone."

"Yes, you can do that," she said, "or take the `Angela's Ashes'

tour." She phoned the St. Mary's Development Center, sponsor of the

Limerick walks. Though it was late in the winter day and the sun

would set at 4:30, tour guide Michael O'Donnell agreed to lead a

walk. He showed up within minutes with a Radio France reporter in

tow who was in town to cover the premiere of the film.

O'Donnell pumped my hand and began talking as we walked. "Frank

McCourt said to me, `Mick, I just wrote a book. I never dreamed this

success would happen.' But we get people who come all the way here

to Limerick just to take the `Angela's Ashes' walking tour. From

England, from America, all the way from America, can you believe it?

But that's the powerful effect the book has had on people.

Twenty-six languages it's in, sold four million copies."

We stood on Arthur's Quay, a flat green park fronting the Shannon

where once stood the lanes, a maze of poverty and damp. O'Donnell

raised his voice above the traffic din.

"Of course, people want to see the Limerick from `Angela's Ashes,'

but it doesn't exist. The city has changed so much, and I'm proud of

that." O'Donnell walked quickly, belying his age of 65. He flicked

out a Major and lit it in one quick mo

Midland "Base Camp" emergency radioCombines the emergency power of a dynamo crank with GMRS 2-way radio technologyIdeal for hiking or camping enthusiasts as an essential precautionary tool for anyemergency situationCompatible with other FRS/GMRS radios22 Channels2-Way GMRS radio with mic (7 FRS/GMRS, 7 FRS, 8 GMRS) Dynamo crank power NOAA all hazards weather alerts 121 Privacy codes eVox Channel scan Auto squelch Hi/lo power settings Large LCD with backlighting Flashlight AM/FM radio Clock with alarm External jacksinclude headset/microphone jack and USB jack to charge electronic devices such as cell phones (USB cable not included)Package includes: radio, AC adapter, DC adapter, accessory mic, and rechargeable battery3 Year manufacturer's warrantyBlackMIDXT511

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New-GMRS Emergency Radio DynamoCrank - MID-XT511

Midland Radio Midland HH54VP2 Weather & Alert Radio for Personal with Child Abduction Emergency (Amber Alert) - Specific Are...

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Midland Radio Midland HH54VP2 Weather & Alert Radio for Personal with Child Abduction Emergency (Amber Alert) - Specific Are...

• AM (520-1710 KHz) and FM (87-108MHz)
• NOAA weatherband ? all 7 channels
• Built-in 3 white LED light source
• Powered by solar or dynamo both of which charge internal Ni-MH battery
• USB cell phone charger

Self-Powered AM/FM/NOAA Weather Radio with Flashlight, Solar Power, and Cell Phone Charger

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Etón FR160R Microlink Self-Powered AM/FM/NOAA Weather Radio with Flashlight, Solar Power and Cell Phone Charger (Red)

Paul Davis Restoration Provides Tips for National Preparedness Month in September
Jacksonville, FL (Vocus) August 28, 2009

September is National Preparedness Month and that means its time to plan for emergency preparedness measures for the home and business. According to the sponsor, the National Safety Council, it's best to think first about the basics of survival: fresh water, food, clean air and warmth. In support of this event, Paul Davis Restoration, a leading national provider of structural clean up and restoration services for losses due to water, fire, storm and other disasters, offers the following tips on how to prepare for possible emergency and disaster occurrences.

According to J. "Sonny" Bass, Paul Davis Restorations Technical Director of Emergency Services, the company is participating in National Preparedness Month to help raise awareness of the importance of being prepared for catastrophic events and natural disasters. Each year, Paul Davis Restoration offices respond to thousands of emergency calls throughout the country providing property owners and insurance professionals with specialized water and fire damage restoration solutions. Paul Davis technicians are certified by The Institute of Inspection, Cleaning and Restoration Certification. The Institute of Inspection, Cleaning and Restoration Certification is the leading industry organization that specializes in certification, training and standards for the emergency mitigation, restoration and structural drying industry.

Dont wait for an emergency to think about being prepared. We support the public awareness campaign which is sponsored by the National Safety Council and the United States Department of Homeland Security to prepare for emergencies with the key, four basic steps including get a kit, make a plan, be informed and get involved, said Bass. We suggest that everyone has a ready plan with the tools, tips and additional resources to prepare the home and office for anything that may happen, he said. Also, be sure to contact a reputable, licensed and insured restoration contractor like Paul Davis Restoration to repair damage resulting from emergencies like floods, fire, smoke, storms or other disasters.

Bass also encourages everyone to have a Basic Emergency Portable Supply Kit that should at least include the following items:

Water one gallon of water per person per day for at least three days

Food at least a three-day supply of non-perishable food

Battery - powered or hand crank commercial radio and a NOAA Weather Radio and extra batteries for both

Cell Phone - with charger

Flashlight - and extra batteries

First aid kit with sterile dressings; antibiotic ointment; burn ointment; adhesive bandages in a variety of sizes; scissors; eye wash; thermometer (adult and baby); non-prescription drugs such as aspirin or non-aspirin pain reliever; prescription medications; prescribed medical supplies such as glucose and blood pressure monitoring equipment.

You should also consider adding the following items to your kit:

Can opener, garbage bags and plastic ties

Infant formula and diapers

Personal and /or feminine supplies

Pet food and extra water for your pet

Documents such as copies of insurance policies, identification and bank account records in a waterproof, portable container

Cash

Sleeping bag or warm blanket for each person.

Complete change of clothing including a long sleeved shirt, long pants and sturdy shoes.

Fire Extinguisher

Matches in a waterproof container

Paper cups, plates and plastic utensils, paper towels

Paper and pencil

Books, games, puzzles or other activities for children

Bass recommends that business owners keep the following items and copies in a waterproof, fireproof portable container including records like site maps, building plans, insurance policies, employee contact and identification information, bank account records, supplier and shipping contact lists, computer backup files, emergency or law enforcement contact information and other priority documents. Store a second set of records at an off-site location.

Talk to your family, friends and co-workers about what emergency preparedness steps and supplies they can feasibly provide, if any. It takes all of us to prepare for and respond to an emergency, Bass said.

National Preparedness Month is in its sixth year. This year, the campaign will focus on changing perceptions about emergency preparedness and will help Americans understand what it truly means to be Ready. Visit the websites for more information at http://www.nsc.org and http://www.ready.gov.

Paul Davis Restoration is one of the nations leading providers of reconstruction, emergency mitigation, restoration, and remodeling services in the areas of residential and commercial property losses due to fire, water, mold and other disasters. The company also specializes in contents cleaning, restoration and inventory tracking for residential and commercial insurance claims. Paul Davis Restoration was established in 1966 and has franchise office locations throughout North America. For more information about Paul Davis Restoration, call 904.737.2779 or visit the website at http://www.pdrestoration.com.

###

• 7 weather channels
• Alert level indicator
• Dynamo crank to recharge radio during power outage
• Water resistant
• This Kit Features 2 Weather Radios. One Is A Crank Radio In Case Of Power Outage
• Mdlwr100: 7 Weather Channels
• Same Technology

Stay up to date on all the latest weather, hazard, and civil emergency information with the Midland WR-100B monitor. Capable of receiving seven National Oceanic & Atmospheric Association (NOAA) channels--each of which receives emergency advisories on tornadoes, floods, severe thunderstorms, civil danger warnings, and more--the WR-100B is a must for people who live in high-risk weather areas, such as the Southeast or Midwest. Plus, the seven NOAA channels offer coverage for roughly 93 percent of the U.S., so most people are well covered regardless of where they live.

List Price: $ 74.99
Price: $ 63.97

Midland WR-100 WeatherAlert All-Hazard Weather Radio and Midland ER102 7-Channel Emergency Crank Radio with AM/FM/Weather Alert

When you find yourself in an emergency situation information can be vital to survival. Knowing the type and extent of an emergency situation enables a person to make informed decisions critical to survival. This emergency AM/FM radio can help you avoid walking into an even more dangerous area. It has excellent AM/ FM radio reception for tuning into emergency broadcasts to get information about the nature and scope of the emergency. This unit is perfect for all emergencies and all locations (including power blackouts roadside emergency etc.) making it a a great addition tor your emergency kit bedside stand or car. Compact and portable it is also ideal for outdoor activities such as camping hiking boating etc. Frequency/Reception: FM 88108 MHz AM 5251650 KHz. Dimensions: 2.5 x 1.25 x 4 . Power Source: 2 AAA size batteries (not included). Disaster Usage: Earthquakes hurricanes tornados tsunamis winter storms floods power outages roadside emergencies. Perfect for emergencies or just listening to the radio for fun. Light compact with surprising sound. Keep in the car in case you have to unexpectedly get out and walk during an emergency. Instructions: After installing batteries switch on/off switch to the on position select AM or FM then select the desired radio station.

List Price:
Price: 26.33

Quake Kare 6M Portable AmFm Emergency Radio

9.4 Million Drop, Cover & Hold On!
Sacramento, CA (PRWEB) October 21, 2011

The 2011 Great California ShakeOut earthquake drill exceeded all expectations. More than 8.6 million Californians plus an additional 800,000 people in Oregon, Nevada, Idaho, Guam, and British Columbia encouraged by live drill broadcasts on more than 55 California radio and television stations simultaneously practiced the Drop, Cover and Hold On drill recommended by experts as essential for avoiding injury and even death in the event of a major earthquake.

Participants included businesspersons, government officials, hospital staffs, emergency responders, people in their homes, and nearly 6 million students, teachers and administrators in schools throughout the state. Many people followed drill instructions that were aired by radio stations in every major city in California. The 60-second Drill Broadcast featured detailed instructions about what to before, during and after a major temblor.

Significant increases in participation over last year were seen among children and preschoolers, businesses, medical facilities, federal agency personnel, and non-profit organizations. Also, there were increases in most regions monitored statewide, with Northern California and Central Valley counties showing nearly 50% increase over 2010 ShakeOut participation.

We monitor registration forms and participation meticulously to ensure accuracy, said Earthquake Country Alliance (ECA) Executive Director Mark Benthien, who has shepherded the Great ShakeOut since its beginning in Southern California in 2008, when 5.4 million registered to participate.

We are especially pleased to see so many schoolchildren learning the correct and safe way to react to an earthquake. Our intention is that they grow up with an instinct for the correct immediate response to earthquakes, said Benthien.

Bob Spears, Director, Office of Emergency Services, Los Angeles Unified School District, said the District stressed that Every school has a Safe School Plan. Millions of students, teachers and administrators had the opportunity to practice activities important for their survival. Nearly 2000 schools and school districts registered more than 5,800,000 drill participants.

Participation was high among higher education institutions too, with colleges participating from one end of the state to the other. At U.S.C., home of the Great ShakeOut, the schools emergency planning specialist Steve Goldfarb emphasized that All departments and schools used the drill to test their emergency response and disaster recovery plans. Thursday mornings tally showed more than 200 college and universities registering more than 1.3 million participants.

At the Target store in the Los Angeles suburb of Northridge, site of a devastating 1994 7.1 earthquake, media and delegations from Japan, China and Mexico gathered to capture the experience on board the Big Shaker earthquake simulator, and to witness a store-wide drill involving employees and customers along with assembled media and federal, state and local officials.

Cary Strouse, Senior Vice President of Target Stores, stated that Targets goal is to help our team members and our customers ensure their safety.

More than 1100 businesses registered nearly half a million ShakeOut participants. Strouse and United States Geological Survey seismologist Lucy Jones, the nations foremost earthquake expert, announced a Memorandum of Understanding to work together collaboratively to better understand and reduce the earthquake risks at Target stores everywhere.

Anne Castle, Assistant Secretary for Water and Science for the US Department of Interior, speaking to the media at the Northridge Drop, Cover and Hold On event reminded that Earthquakes are part of our lives in California, and expressed her belief that because of ShakeOut we are all going to be safer and have safer families.

Observing that Drop, Cover and Hold On can be counter-intuitive, Acting Cal EMA Secretary Mike Dayton noted that We are delighted to see that a growing number of Californians are paying attention, are practicing safe actions, and are preparing for survival during an earthquake and in the critical days that follow.

Responding to media questions about recovery following an earthquake, Glenn Pomeroy, CEO of the California Earthquake Authority, stressed that Homeowners insurance does not cover damage from an earthquake. He encouraged Californians to consider earthquake insurance to protect their home and belongings so they can get back to normal faster following the next damaging earthquake.

In that vein, Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa reminded that everyone of us understands that it is our collective responsibility to have a plan, to be prepared.

At a similar ShakeOut event in Hayward, California, which also featured simulated earthquakes on a Big Shaker, State Senator Ellen Corbett and Assembly Member Mary Hayashi both spoke highly of the value of the ShakeOut to all Californians.

Additional ShakeOut activities designed for the educational value of media exposure, were held in Westlake Village, El Cerrito, Brawley, Gardena, Cal State Northridge, Cal State Fullerton, Castaic, San Rafael, Coachella, Yucca Valley, Fontana, Apple Valley, San Diego, San Francisco, El Cajon, San Luis Obispo, Palo Alto, San Jose, and Santa Rosa.

The http://www.ShakeOut.org Web site designers have included specific planning and safety information for individuals, families, businesses, churches, organizations and government agencies so they can prepare for serious earthquakes, get through them safely, and be able to have a survivable post-quake existence when essential services are likely to be disrupted for days or weeks.

They have included many links to other key sources including FEMA, Cal EMA and more. http://www.ShakeOut.org remains an available resource for the public yearround and connects people to every other major earthquake resource in the state.

According to ECAs Benthien, The ShakeOut was designed not just as a one-day-a-year exercise but as an on-going education and training experience through its powerful Internet presence at http://www.ShakeOut.org. Other regions in the U.S. and other nations are modeling their ShakeOut events after ours, and likewise their Web sites.

What began in 2008 in Southern California and then quickly spread throughout the state now includes participants in Oregon, Nevada, Idaho, British Columbia, Guam, and even a group in Asia headquartered in Tajikistan. This years ShakeOut activities in the Los Angeles area were observed by interested groups of advertising and earthquake insurance people from Mexico, China and Japan, where similar earthquake drills are being planned using the Great California ShakeOut as a model. Eleven states in the Central United States have already modeled one ShakeOut after Californias, and are planning another for next spring.

Heather Lyle, Director of Integrated Public Safety/Emergency Management British Columbia, noted that the BC Earthquake Alliance and ShakeOut BC Organizing Committee are pleased to join forces with Californias ShakeOut campaign. By coordinating our drills for the same day and time, Lyle pointed out, we are building a lasting partnership that will make our programs stronger and more resilient, supporting our mutual goal of earthquake awareness and emergency preparedness.

The Great California ShakeOut highlights public-private partnerships between government, communities and the private sector, with sponsors including Earthquake Country Alliance (ECA) members: California Emergency Management Agency (Cal EMA), the Southern California Earthquake Center (SCEC), the United States Geological Survey (USGS), the California Earthquake Authority (CEA), the American Red Cross (ARC), the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), the California

Midland Base Camp 2-way Radio FRS GMRS and Garmin GPS

• AM (520-1700 KHz), FM (88-108 MHz), SW (5800-12200 KHz) NOAA weather all 7 channels plus
• Digital display with LED illuminated backlit Digital clock function with alarm snooze
• From the AC via USB adapter (not included); Solar power which charges Ni-MH battery Built-in four white LED
• USB cell phone charger (USB cable not included) Connectors, with rubber gaskets/plugs to seal out moisture
• Dimensions: 7.75¿ X 8.5¿ X 2.5¿ and 196.9 x 215.9 x 63.5 mm (W x H x D) Weight: 1.9 lbs. and 0.86 kg

Self-Powered Digital AM/FM/SW/NOAA, S.A.M.E. Weather Radio with Flashlight, Siren, Solar Power and Cell Phone Charger

List Price: $ 100.00
Price: $ 100.00

Etón FR600B Solarlink Self-Powered Digital AM/FM/SW/NOAA S.A.M.E. Weather Radio with Flashlight, Siren, Solar Power and Cell Phone Charger (Black)

Midland Emergency Crank AM/FM/WX Alert Radio w/ USB ER102

List Price:
Price: 56.58

Midland Emergency Crank AM/FM/WX Alert Radio w/ USB ER102

• An emergency radio with outstanding reception
• 4 different power options available: dynamo, solar, battery and AC adaptor
• AM/FM/SW radio with thermometer, compass, flashlight, clock, siren and a storage compartment
• Small and light with a shoulder band, easy to carry
• 90-day money back guarantee

The Kaito Voyager KA888 is a sister product of Kaito's widely praised emergency radios KA007, KA008 and KA009. With its revolutionary design and versatile functions, it's an ideal companion for emergency preparedness purposes, outdoor activities as well as traveling. Specifically designed for emergency situations, the KA888 offers different methods to power itself. Those methods include AC/DC adapter (included), three AA batteries (not included), the built-in rechargeable Ni-MH battery which can be recharged from the AC adapter or by hand crank. At the heart of the KA888, there is an internal generator that charges the internal Ni-MH battery pack and powers the radio, flashlight, siren & etc. You can use the KA500 to receive a wide range of broadcasting including AM, FM and shortwave. Standard accessories include AC adapter, earphones & user manual. Radio Bands AM:525 KHz 1710KHz, FM:88MHz-108 MHz Two Continuous short wave bands: SW1: 6.00- 12.00 MHz SW2: 12.00- 18.50MHz

List Price: $ 79.95
Price: $ 25.89

Kaito KA888 4-way Powered Emergency Radio

"Motorola T9680RSAME, The Motorola Talkabout T9680RSAME two way radio adds emergency prepardness functionality to Motorola's most powerful consumer two way radio. With a slightly longer antenna, the radio can achieve a 28 mile range in optimal conditions (typically 2 miles in urban conditions). This Hazard Alert radio, features SAME technology, which notifies you when there is a severe weather warning or civil emergency. With the iVOX hands free feature the T9680RSAME acts as a speaker phone, allowing you to multitask while using the radio. Hands free (VOX) mode on this model works with or without an optional headset. Other features include VibraCall vibrating alert, support to all 22 FRS and GMRS channels with an amazing 121 interference eliminator (privacy) codes per channel, channel scan and a backlit display. T9680RSAME Features: Talkabout Two-Way Radio, Up To 25 Mile Range, 22 Channels & 121 Privacy Codes For 2, 662 Combinations, 11 Weather Channels (7 NOAA) w/ Alert Feature, Specific Area Message Encoding (SAME) Technology - Filters Out Unnecessary Distant Weather & Non-Weather Broadcasts - Monitors Only Local Area, Talk On Both FRS & GMRS Services, iVOX Hands-Free Communication Without The Need Of An Audio Accessory, VibraCall vibrating alert, Push-to-Talk (PTT) Power Boost, 10 Call Alert Tones, Incremental Volume Control, Backlit LCD Display, Talk Confirmation Tone, Keypad Lock, Monitor Channel, Advanced Priority Scan, Quiet Talk Interruption Filter, Time-Out Timer, Battery Save Feature, Audible Low Battery Alert, Mini USB Charging, Dual power: - 27 Hours Alkaline (3AA) - 9 Hours NiMH Estimated Talk Time"

List Price:
Price: 75.99

Motorola T9680RSAME Two Way Radio

Get Ready for Winter IV: Amica Insurance Offers Tips
Lincoln, RI (PRWEB) November 21, 2011

* Fourth in a weekly series

Severe winter weather has already struck several parts of the country, reminding us all of the need to be prepared for snow, ice and freezing temperatures. So Amica Insurance is offering tips to help keep you and your family safe in your home and car this winter.

Severe winter weather can leave you without power and heat, sometimes for days at a time, said Sean Welch a senior assistant vice president with Amica. Thats why its important to be prepared. Make sure you have plenty of emergency supplies at home and in your car. And make sure you have a way to contact all members of your family, especially if youre not together when a storm hits.

If a storm is in the forecast, make sure your cell phone is charged and your gas tank is full, Welch said. Its also important to have enough supplies at home to last you a few days, in case you lose power or become stranded. These should include:

Extra drinking water
Non-perishable food
Prescriptions and other medicines
Baby supplies
Flashlights and extra batteries
A battery-operated radio
Extra blankets and sleeping bags
A first aid kit

Its also a good idea to stock up now on shovels, sand and non-corrosive ice melt, Welch said. Make sure your snow removal equipment, including snow blowers, are ready to run efficiently and safely. And remind everyone of the important safety precautions needed when using this equipment.

Winter storms can also cause dangerous driving conditions, so keep emergency supplies in your car in case you get stuck while traveling, Welch said. These include:

An ice scraper and brush
A shovel and a bag of sand for tire traction
Jumper cables
Flares
A flashlight
A first aid kit
Blankets
Extra winter clothes

Check and update your familys emergency supply kits often, Welch said. Hopefully you will never have to use them, but its better to prepared.

For more information on protecting your home for winter, visit http://www.disastersafety.org.

*This is the fourth in a weekly series of tips Amica Insurance is offering during November to help prepare and protect your home and family this winter.

To see the first, second and third installments of the series visit Amica.com.

About Amica Mutual Insurance

Amica Mutual Insurance Company, the nations oldest mutual insurer of automobiles, was founded in 1907. The company, with corporate headquarters in Lincoln, RI, is a national writer of automobile, homeowners, marine and personal umbrella liability insurance. Life coverage is available through Amica Life Insurance Company, a wholly owned subsidiary. Amica employs more than 3,100 people in 40 offices across the country.

CONTACT: Vince Burks, Corporate Communications, 50 Amica Way,

Lincoln, RI 02865-1155, 1-800-652-6422, ext. 24563.

Website: Amica.com

Twitter: Amica Insurance

Facebook: Amica Mutual Insurance Co.

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COMMS: Emergency Radio Options for Your 72 Hour Kit

Mitaki-Japan Crank Radio/Flashlight Weather Radio. Features FM/weather radio, weather warning alert, recharge jack and cord for mobile devices. Includes earphone jack, wrist strap and DC output socket (DC cord not included). One minute of winding gives yo

List Price:
Price: 35.95

Mitaki-Japan Crank Radio/Flashlight Weather Radio(Pack of 1)

Surviving an Ice Storm-Induced Power Outage
Chicago, IL (PRWEB) December 2, 2004

Hurricane season may be officially behind us, but the threat of wide-spread power outages still loom in the horizon.

"Ice storms can snap power lines just as easily as any hurricane," said Jon Hoch, founder of Electric Generators Direct.com (http://www.electricgeneratorsdirect.com), an online emergency generator superstore.

Surviving an ice storm-induced power outage is a lot different from the recent hurricanes in Florida, warns Hoch. First, even is you have a natural gas furnance, it will not operate without electricity to power the blower. Secondly, if you try coping without the heat, the decrease in temperature could freeze your water pipes, causing them burst and flood your home. And finally, the days are much shorter, and the need for artificial light is even more critical.

According to Hoch, you simply need a portable generator and a power transfer system to protect yourself from the next power outage. Many homeowners are unable or unwilling to wait out the next power outage, so they are converting their portable generators into emergency backup power systems.

Shop by Style (http://electricgeneratorsdirect.com/catalog/shopbystyle.php) Recreational generators are great for tailgating or camping. A power outage, however, is no picnic. Small recreational models will only power an appliance or two. Plus, you'll need to refill their small gas tanks every few hours. Unless your a contactor using your generator on a daily basis, you don't need to go overboard with a jobsite model with a professional grade engine either.

"What's the point in purchasing a top-of-the line generator with all the bells and whistles that's only used a few times a year?" asks Hoch.

Electric Generators Direct actually grades the style of every generator to help customers quickly find their perfect portable generator. Hoch recommends purchasing a do-it-yourself grade model specifically designed for "Emergency Power" and reinvesting the savings into a generator with additional wattage.

Shop by Watts (http://electricgeneratorsdirect.com/catalog/shopbywatts.php). Yes, you can calculate your exact wattage needs through various online wattage calculators. Electric Generators Direct recommends Power Protection's Home Wattage Wizard (http://www.powerprotection.org/powergeneration/homewattage.shtml).

According to Hoch, the service is nice, but not always necessary. Electric Generators Direct has categorized their "Emergency Power" generators into three sizes: Mid-Sized, Large and X-Large. Mid-Sized generators (4,000-5,000 watts) will power your basic survival appliances. Large generators (6,000-9,000 watts) will help make the power outage experience more peaceful, supplying power to even more appliance.

X-Large generators (10,000+ watts) supply enough electricity to restore power to small homes. Most include an electric starter, which is ideal for elderly homeowners who are unable to pull the cord. Getting the generator is one thing. Getting the electricity into the house is another. According to Tom Kraeutler, host of the nationally syndicated Money Pit radio show (http://www.888moneypit.com), you NEVER should back feed the electricity into the house. If done incorrectly, you can electrocute utility workers repairing downed power lines.

Kraeutler says extension cords are fine for small generators because you can only plug in one or two appliances. The most common way to use a portable electric generator is to place it outdoors, then run extension cords through an open window or door to the chosen appliances.

Extension cords have several drawbacks. First, most extension cords can't be plugged into a furnace, well pump or ceiling-light fixture. If the cords are too long, the resulting power drop may damage the generator and appliances. And, if they are placed under rugs or carpets, heat can buildup and spark a fire.

For safety's sake, Kraeutler recommends hiring a licensed electrician to install a power transfer system that redistributes power from the generator to the circuit panel. The power transfer system (starting around $ 200) reduces the need for multiple extension cords running from the generator to an individual appliance.

It is installed beside the main electrical panel, and then it's connected to the circuits you'll want running during a blackout. When the power goes out, you simply crank up the generator and run a single power cord from it to a transfer switch.

"Once the generator is running, you can choose which appliances and circuits you want to use by simply flipping the switches," said Kraeutler.

Most manual transfer switches also include built-in wattage meters, which keep track of what's being powered. Without them, you can overload the system, damaging your generator and appliances.

"A typical power transfer system installation will take about 3-4 hours and cost around $ 200-$ 300," said Kraeutler. "But it's an investment that will be fully appreciated the next time the power goes out."

About Electric Generators Direct

Electric Generators Direct (http://www.electricgeneratorsdirect.com) is an online generator superstore owned and operated by Power Equipment Direct, Inc.

The company also maintains Pressure Washers Direct (http://www.pressurewashersdirect.com) and Air Compressors Direct (http://www.aircompressorsdirect.com).

# # #

Midland ER102 Emergency Radio Review - Survival Communications

121 137280 ft 22 3 Year 7FRS 7GMRS/FRS 8GMRS Dynamo Crank Power NOAA All Hazards Weather Alerts eVOX Channel Scan Auto Squelch AM/FM Radio Flashlight AM/FM Radio Clock with ALarm XT511 Base Camp 2-way Radio AC Adapter Hand Mic Shoulder Strap Rechargeable Batteries Owner's Manual The XT511 Base Camp Radio combines the emergency power of a Dynamo Crank with GMRS 2-way radio technology. The XT511 is ideal for hiking or camping enthusiasts as an essential precautionary tool for any emergency situation. Compatible with other FRS/GMRS radios. LCD - with Backlighting Midland Midland Radio Corporation Two Way Radio XT511 XT511 Base Camp 2-way Radio www.midlandradio.com

List Price:
Price: 64.99

Midland XT511 Base Camp 2-way Radio

Midland Base Camp Radio

The perfect addition to an emergency kit. When the electricity goes off at home work or while traveling you can listen to the radio by simply cranking the handle for approximately 60 seconds. Comes with telescopic antenna 2 speaker and ear buds. Also runs on 2 AA batteries or 6V AC adapter (not included). Limited 90 day warranty. Gift boxed.

List Price:
Price: 28.28

BNF ELCRANK MitakiJapan AM/FM/Weather Band Emergency Crank Radio

You need to own a hand crank short wave radio. While these shortwave radios may seem to some like novelties, they can save your life in an emergency. A shortwave radio isn't just some AM/FM radio, it picks up a variety of shortwave radio signals. These can include but aren't limited to weather stations, news broad casts, and even signals from other parts of the country and the world. While you may not think of these as important, in an emergency, these radios and stations can be your only link to the outside world.

A hand crank short wave radio has many different power options today. What the hand crank does is every time you turn the crank, the mechanical energy is instantly turned into electrical energy, enough to power the radio itself, and even to charge up the rechargeable batteries. Because the cranking technology has improved so much over the last few decades, turning the crank just a few minutes can power the radio continuously for more than two hours without interruption. They can also use batteries, and when there is power, plugged into the wall outlets.

The real purpose of a hand crank shortwave radio is for if you are stranded, whether on land or at sea, or if you are in the middle of some kind of natural or man made disaster. No matter what the situation, chances are there isn't going to be any electrical power, and any kind of regular electronic device isn't going to work. This is where the hand crank action comes into play. In many cases, evacuation procedures are going to be announced over short wave radios from emergency services. They may tell you that help is on the way, where to go, and even what to do until help arrives. In the case of flooding, storms, or tornadoes there can be more important information given on how long the storm is going to last, or how much more inclement weather is on the way. Without this vital information, you could be headed for an even more dangerous situation, or even stranded for longer, because you didn't know where to go or what to do.

It is important that you keep a hand crank shortwave radio in many different places. You should have shortwave radios in your home, vehicle, and if you own an RV or a boat, you should have one in these as well. You just never know where an emergency will strike, and having one at home while you are stranded in the middle of nowhere doesn't do you any good.

Just as a hand crank shortwave radio can save your life, you also have to buy the right shortwave radios as well. There are many different brands and models of these radios, and they come in a varying prices. While there many different models, not all of them are the same. The first thing you need to think about when choosing one of these radios is what your needs are. If you just want one to listen to music on the go without having to lug around a bunch of batteries, then cheaper models are a decent choice. One of these is the Eton FR 150. This radio is small and compact, and has very minimal options. Because of this, the cost is quite low.

For emergency hand crank short wave radio options, where you need access to multiples channels, and emergency bands, more expensive shortwave radios are a better option. This is because they have a better quality sound, and are able to pull in more channels and stations. They have better batteries, and their cranking mechanisms last far longer than cheaper models. Even so, a good radio shouldn't cost you more than fifty to a hundred dollars.

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Storm Alert Crank Weather Band Radio

• weather alert
• am fm radio

Midland Weather Radios can be critically invaluable tools to have when an approaching storm threatens your local area! Weather alert radios from Midland feature outstanding performance and reliability at an affordable price. Midland weather radios incorporate attractive designs and are available in either portable or desktop models.

Midland weather radios are the perfect companion for the home or office, when traveling, and for walkers, boaters, hikers and campers. Receiving early notification of approaching hurricanes, tornadoes, floods or other severe weather conditions could be a lifesaver!

Many models of Midland emergency alert radios feature S.A.M.E. technology (Specific Area Message Encoding) which allows you to localize NOAA weather radio alert broadcasts to six local counties and screen out unwanted, non-local warnings.

Midland offers a wide selection of NOAA weather radios featuring options and accessories such as AM/FM; external antennas; cigarette lighter powers adapters; flashing strobe lights; loud audio alarms and much more!

List Price: $ 49.99
Price: $ 49.99

New MIDLAND RADIO Emergency Crank Weather Alert Radio Digital AM/FM Radio NOAA Hazards/Weather Alert