"If you have the Irish brogue and you smile a charming smile, there is feck all you can't get away with," Malachy McCourt notes in Singing My Him Song, the second half of his autobiography. The quip would have been more appropriate to his first book, A Monk Swimming, which freely detailed how McCourt took ruthless advantage of his friends and family, bluffed his way into a stage-acting career, made fast cash by smuggling gold to India, neglected his family until his wife left him, and then terrorized his way back into her life and subsequently into jail. His gift for colorful tales told in effusively lively prose made him a minor Manhattan celebrity, but his personal life remained in a shambles as his drinking, his inner rage over his horrific childhood in Ireland, and his talent for self-justification kept him from building any sort of lasting peace with himself. Song continues the colorful tales, but in a far more muted voice, as McCourt alternates stories of energetic, alcohol-fueled mayhem with waves of racking guilt and self-hatred over his physical and emotional disintegration. The marauding yang to the sober yin of his brother Frank (author of Angela's Ashes and 'Tis), McCourt has lived an astonishing life, and Song skims across its highs and lows with reckless, entertaining abandon, as the author hops through 40 years of star-studded stints as a movie actor (and starving would-be movie actor), a soap-opera regular (seemingly always playing the "genial Irish pub owner"), a left-wing radio host, and a celebrity bartender. While neglecting or fighting with his new wife and both his old and new children, McCourt travels across the country and around the world, describing the most appallingly self-centered behavior with sly humor and clever turns of phrase that inevitably evoke as much admiration as shock. His talent for creative expression is so great that it even keeps his ultimate redemption and recovery from turning maudlin, pious, or preachy, as such tales often are. Frank McCourt fans may want to pick up this book just to find out what ultimately happened to Angela's ashes, which feature prominently in some of Malachy's appalling but hilarious anecdotes. For everyone else, Singing My Him Song is a bitter but unflaggingly riotous jokebook with a happy ending as its surprising punchline.