All Souls: A Family Story from Southie

All Souls: A Family Story from Southie

A breakaway bestseller since its first printing, All Souls takes us deep into Michael Patrick MacDonaldâ‚¬s Southie, the proudly insular neighborhood with the highest concentration of white poverty in America. The anti-busing riots of 1974 forever changed Southie, Bostonâ‚¬s working class Irish community, branding it as a violent, racist enclave. Michael Patrick MacDonald grew up in Southieâ‚¬s Old Colony housing project. He describes the way this world within a world felt to the troubled yet keenly gifted observer he was even as a child: â‚¬Å“[as if] we were protected, as if the whole neighborhood was watching our backs for threats, watching for all the enemies we could never really define.â‚¬Â

But the threats-poverty, drugs, a shadowy gangster world-were real. MacDonald lost four of his siblings to violence and poverty. All Souls is heart-breaking testimony to lives lost too early, and the story of how a place so filled with pain could still be â‚¬Å“the best place in the world.â‚¬Â

We meet Ma, Michaelâ‚¬s mini-skirted, accordian-playing, usually single mother who cares for her children there are eventually eleven through a combination of high spirits and inspired â‚¬Å“getting over.â‚¬Â And there are Michaelâ‚¬s older siblings Davey, sweet artist-dreamer; Kevin, child genius of scam; and Frankie, Golden Gloves boxer and neighborhood hero whose lives are high-wire acts played out in a world of poverty and pride.

But too soon Southie becomes a place controlled by resident gangster Whitey Bulger, later revealed to be an FBI informant even as he ran the drug culture that Southie supposedly never had. It was a world primed for the escalation of class violence-and then, with deadly and sickening inevitability, of racial violence that swirled around forced busing. MacDonald, eight years old when the riots hit, gives an explosive account of the asphalt warfare. He tells of feeling â‚¬Å“part of it all, part of something bigger than Iâ‚¬d ever imagined, part of something that was on the national news every night.â‚¬Â

Within a few years-a sequence laid out in All Souls with mesmerizing urgency-the neighborhoodâ‚¬s collapse is echoed by the MacDonald familyâ‚¬s tragedies. All but destroyed by grief and by the Southie code that

doesnâ‚¬t allow him to feel it, MacDonald gets out. His work as a peace activist, first in the all-Black neighborhoods of nearby Roxbury, then back to the Southie he canâ‚¬t help but love, is the powerfully redemptive close to a story that will leave readers utterly shaken and changed.
Country USA
Brand Beacon Press
Manufacturer Beacon Press
Binding Paperback
ItemPartNumber part_0807072133
Color Multicolor
ReleaseDate 2007-11-01
UnitCount 1
UPCs 884830516647
EANs 9780807072134

Country	USA
Brand	Beacon Press
Manufacturer	Beacon Press
Binding	Paperback
ItemPartNumber	part_0807072133
Color	Multicolor
ReleaseDate	2007-11-01
UnitCount	1
UPCs	884830516647
EANs	9780807072134

All Souls: A Family Story from Southie

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