A Book Lover's Holiday Shopping List

The sixty-year-old writer talks with Terry Gross about his new book "Angela's Ashes." The memoir recounts his childhood experience growing up in the slums of Ireland. McCourt lives in New York.

Book critic Maureen Corrigan reviews "Angela's Ashes," a new memoir by Frank McCourt. It's the 60-year-old author's first book.

New York magazine film critic David Denby is interviewed by Fresh Air's Book Critic Maureen Corrigan about his new book "Great Books: My Adventures with Homer, Rousseau, Woolf, and Other Indestructible Writers of the Western World." It comes from Denby's recent return to Columbia University to take two western civilization classes. He wanted to explore the current debate in literature of whether these classic books should be required reading in today's multi-cultural society.