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A breakaway bestseller since its first printing, All Souls takes us deep into Michael Patrick MacDonald’s Southie, the proudly insular neighborhood with the highest concentration of white poverty in America. The anti-busing riots of 1974 forever changed Southie, Boston’s working class Irish community, branding it as a violent, racist enclave. Michael Patrick MacDonald grew up in Southie’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: “[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.”
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 “the best place in the world.”
We meet Ma, Michael’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 “getting over.” And there are Michael’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 “part of it all, part of something bigger than I’d ever imagined, part of something that was on the national news every night.”
Within a few years-a sequence laid out in All Souls with mesmerizing urgency-the neighborhood’s collapse is echoed by the MacDonald family’s tragedies. All but destroyed by grief and by the Southie code that
doesn’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 can’t help but love, is the powerfully redemptive close to a story that will leave readers utterly shaken and changed.
- Sales Rank: #38970 in Books
- Published on: 2007-11-01
- Released on: 2007-11-01
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.48" h x .71" w x 5.51" l, .80 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 296 pages
From Publishers Weekly
In this plainly written, powerful memoir, MacDonald, now 32, details not only his own story of growing up in Southie, Boston's Irish Catholic enclave, but examines the myriad ways in which the media and law enforcement agencies exploit marginalized working-class communities. MacDonald was one of nine children born (of several fathers) to his mother, Helen MacDonald, a colorful woman who played the accordion in local Irish pubs to supplement her welfare checks. Having grown up in the Old Colony housing project, he describes his neighbors' indigence and pride of place, as well as their blatant racism (in 1975 the anti-busing riots in Southie made national headlines) and their deep denial of the organized crime and entrenched drug culture that was destroying the youth and social fabric. MacDonald's account is filled with vivid episodes: of his brother Davey's horrific incarceration in Mass Mental and ultimate suicide; of the time Helen took her older kids to the hospital, where her current lover was a patient, to beat him up after he denied he was the father of the child she was carrying; of the murder of his brother Frankie by his compatriots after the police shot him in an armored-car robbery. But perhaps most shocking is the accusation that the FBI was paying Southie's leading gangster, Whitey Bulger, as an informant although they knew he was the neighborhood kingpin. MacDonald, who now works on multiracial social projects in Boston, does not excuse Southie's racism, but he paints a frightening portrait of a community under intense economic and social stress, issuing a forceful plea for understanding and justice. Agent, Palmer and Dodge.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Booklist
"The best place in the world." That's what South Boston people
From Kirkus Reviews
An incendiary, moving book that startles on nearly every page. The notorious anti-busing riots of 1974 forever altered the insular working-class Irish community of South Boston, branding it indelibly as a dangerous, racist enclave. Anti-violence activist MacDonald grew up there and lost four out of eight siblings to violence in those dark times; his debut assesses both his family history, and related secret tales of class strife, bigotry, corruption, and vanished lives. MacDonald utilizes the classically Irish viewpoint of the stoic child to re-create a harsh arena of a 1970s ghetto and urban poverty. His single Ma felt blessed when a local politician secured her entrance to the majority-Irish Old Colony project, the best place in the world''; once there, the MacDonalds had to prove their mettle against delinquents with shotguns, thus acquiring the patina of craziness necessary for survival. At first, the nuances of color seemed minor against a vividly rendered backdrop of economic difficulty and the depraved mainstreaming of hard drugs and street crime. Then came the riots; MacDonalds surefooted (neither hardened nor sentimental) narrative takes us through the years of malaise and violence that followed, as politically connected gangsters, such as the notorious Whitey Bulger, expanded the areas drug trade while violently enforcing a macho myth of silent Southie unity, itself built on the long-burnished notion that the white community was somehow different from such similarly working-class, embattled black areas as Roxbury. This explication of how such phenomena of white class-consciousness encouraged the wholesale deterioration of his neighborhood and contributed to the demise of some 250 young people is a devastating cultural indictment. MacDonalds nimble prose and detailed recall of grim times long past make for luminous reading; his hard-won conception of how ghettoized poverty spawns localized violence, and the dignity he brings to lives snuffed out in chaos, gives All Souls a moral urgency usually lacking in current memoir or crime prose. A remarkable work. (Author tour) -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
Most helpful customer reviews
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful.
Gritty, raw, dirty, out there , truthful
By tleeminnieme
This was a great book. The author spared no reader his descriptions of life in the Irish projects in the 60-80's. Drugs, violence, suicides, broken families- it was all put out there. Nothing was done in a manner to garner sympathy or sadness. This was a true tale of life how it was for this author. It was a hard life. In a way it was like reading a book about a Holocaust survivor. It was a great book.
I would highly recommend this book.
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
A competent, sad story of death and drugs in Southie
By Amazon Customer
This is a competent story – memoir – of what it was like growing up in Southie in the last few decades of the 20th century. Lots of pain and heartache in what is written here. One cannot help but feel helpless at the social problems and corruption evident in the stories. Whitey Bulger comes across as a far less dangerous person that he really was, in this book. See the Netflix documentary for more information on quite TND huge FBI, Boston police, Massachusetts police corruption of the times. Worth reading.
10 of 10 people found the following review helpful.
Accurate. From someone who didn't live in "Southie" but in "Old Colony" at that time!
By Brendan Stewart
You'll see some people chime in here about this book, from "Southie". But Southie and Old Colony don't equal the same thing. You can be from the point and not be anything like someone growing up in Old Colony. Old Colony wasn't the same as D street or Old Harbor. Secondly, my aunt is mentioned in the book as skoochie(sp?). I'm not particularly fond of being from Old Colony or having my aunt in this book, but it's who i am. Lastly, i was good friends with Tommy Veins before he got out of cotrol and died. It's a sad story overall, if tommysdad is here, i'd like to say that my condolences, but this portrayal is not far from fact at all. I was there and grew up where these things happened. And let me tell you, the book is pretty accurate. Slight details here and there might be slightly off, but for the overall idea, Accurate. Everyone knew his mom... she was an outcast for sure and he mentions this several times. I personally couldn't put my own mom out there, but kudos for him for trying to be accurate.
You'll see some people chime in here from "Southie" but unless they were from Old Colony i wouldn't take their perspective as seriously. And just as a point of argument a lot of people from "Southie" didn't like this book coming out because it casted a shadow on the town where whities affects of keeping things within southie are still being felt.
Overall i'd say read this book. It's as close as you are going to get to truly understanding what happened there at that time.
Brendan Stewart
26 Pilsudski Way.
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