All Souls

Michael Patrick MacDonald grew up in the Old Colony housing project in South Boston. He became a leading Boston activist after losing four siblings and witnessing his generation decimated by poverty, crime, and addiction. He helped launch many antiviolence initiatives, including gun-buyback programs. He is still working for social change on a national scale, collaborating with survivor families and young people. MacDonald received the American Book Award in 2000 and has contributed to the Boston Globe Op-Ed Page with numerous essays. All Souls, his national bestseller, and Easter Rising: A Memoir of Roots and Rebellion, his follow-up, have been adopted by university curricula across the country.

All Souls is the written equivalent of an Irish wake, at which revelers dance and sing praises to the deceased. In the same vein, the book balances tragedy with a dash of levity while retaining the heartbreaking details. All Souls, a runaway bestseller since its first printing, takes us deep into Michael Patrick McDonald's Southie, the proudly insular neighborhood with America's highest concentration of white poverty.

MacDonald's Southie, roiled by Whitey Bulger's crime schemes and busing riots, is populated by rough-hewn characters. We meet Ma, Michael's accordion-playing, miniskirted single mother who has lost four of her eleven children. There are also Michael's older siblings, Davey, a sweet artist-dreamer; Kevin, a child genius of a con; and Frankie, a Golden Gloves boxer and neighborhood hero, whose lives are high-wire acts performed in a world of poverty and pride.

MacDonald tells his family story with gritty but moving honesty, nearly suffocated by his grief and his community's code of silence. All Souls is a heartbreaking testament to lives lost far too soon, as well as the story of how a place so full of pain can still be "the best place in the world." The book is regarded as one of the best books on family.

Author: Michael Patrick MacDonald

Link to buy: https://www.amazon.com/dp/0807072133

Ratings: 4.5 out of 5 stars (from 864 reviews)

Best Sellers Rank: #270,774 in Books

#312 in Sociology of Urban Areas

#4,007 in U.S. State & Local History

#10,023 in Memoirs (Books)