Free Ebook All Souls: A Family Story from Southie, by Michael Patrick MacDonald

Free Ebook All Souls: A Family Story from Southie, by Michael Patrick MacDonald

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All Souls: A Family Story from Southie, by Michael Patrick MacDonald

Free Ebook All Souls: A Family Story from Southie, by Michael Patrick MacDonald

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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.

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From Booklist

"The best place in the world." That's what South Boston people

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Product details

Hardcover: 288 pages

Publisher: Beacon Press; First Edition edition (September 25, 1999)

Language: English

ISBN-10: 0807072125

ISBN-13: 978-0807072127

Product Dimensions:

6 x 1 x 9 inches

Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds

Average Customer Review:

4.5 out of 5 stars

545 customer reviews

Amazon Best Sellers Rank:

#642,096 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Michael MacDonald's "All Souls" is a beautiful example of "this-and-that" writing. His coming-of-age memoir of growing up in the rabidly Irish-Catholic enclave of South Boston during the transitional 70s and 80s (drugs, integration, development, gentrification), neither excuses nor glorifies his neighborhood's appalling problems. He simply lays it all out in graphic, oftentimes violent, storytelling images. His style is more journalistic than memoirist: This is what happened - as he knew it or saw it, but not as he felt it - and that was that.Although I loved this book, I only gave it four out of five stars since it wasn't originally conceived, even though MacDonald is an original voice, and was poorly edited. "All Souls" was released more than two years after the 1998 independent film "Southie," starring Donnie Wahlberg, (the movie was shot in South Boston in 1997), which introduced many of the same literal and figurative ideas found in MacDonald's book.Perhaps MacDonald realized that along with all of South Boston's other lost chances - of lives, futures, hopes, traditions, neighborhoods and families - that the chance to tell their own stories was also being taken away by "outsiders."MacDonald deftly uses that victim mentality - that Southies see things as being taken away when in reality they are being left behind because they refuse to adapt and change - as the central theme for his story. South Boston was a proverbial case of "pride goeth before a fall." In MacDonald's telling, it was a hard pride and a hard fall and one from which Southie has yet to recover.

The book is interesting for its image of Southie as seen through the eyes of a child growing up there.The story starts out in the early 1970s, roughly 1974. I lived in greater Boston at this time. I moved there for work, excited to move to a college town, in the state that voted for George McGovern. Unfortunately, Boston was not just a college town. I had the wrong accent, and in business there were many Bostonians who treated me as an outsider, not to be trusted. That same distrust of outsiders pervades Southie.The events of the day were very disturbing. Having campaigned for Tom Bradley (first black mayor of Los Angeles) a few years earlier, I was horrified by events in Boston. Louise Day Hicks, people shouting “Bus the n****** back to Africa,” and the stoning of school buses were all beyond my comprehension.Although I witnessed racist parades in my neighborhood on Massachusetts Avenue, I only saw the events in Southie in the news, either the Boston Globe or WBZ. I had two colleagues at work, Joe and Michael, both from Southie, who had advised me not to go there without one of them to escort me. Hearing of the racial conflict in Southie, I envisioned working class whites against black kids, when in fact it was poor whites, many on welfare, resisting integration with black kids of similar or better economic status.Welfare mothers, having more babies by different fathers; unemployed alcoholic men hanging out on the street with a paper bag; dropouts; shoplifting and theft and gangs. That was a stereotype I had heard used to describe life in the ghetto. That same stereotype turns out to describe perfectly the white population of the housing projects in Southie, as described by the author.Early on, I read the smattering of negative reviews. I attributed some of them to being judgmental about the people in the book, including the author’s single mother, criminal siblings, and racist neighbors. Still, I enjoyed getting the author’s perspective, as the author is writing about his experiences as a child. But, as the book progressed I found myself losing interest. First, I was having trouble keeping track of all the characters, many of whom are siblings, but many are not. I should have started a list when I began reading the book. Second, I began to feel as if I were stuck in a waiting room, forced to watch The Jerry Springer Show. I didn’t think very highly of these people when I lived in Boston, and a more intimate portrayal does not help. In fact, they’re more dysfunctional than I thought.Boston has changed (and so has Southie), but the time I lived there is chronicled in this book. It was a year that persuaded me that I fit better in Los Angeles.Bottom line: I would grab a tablet to write down the names of all the characters as they appear, open Google Maps to South Boston, at the intersection of 8th Street and Dorchester Street (not Dorchester Avenue), and the traffic circle where Old Colony meets Columbia and Preble. Rotary Liquors is what was once the HQ for Whitey Bulger’s criminal enterprise. Read the book for as long as it holds your interest. If you can get through the litany of death and disaster in the middle, the story gains an adult perspective and once again commands attention.

This deeply moving biographical novel succinctly captures the eternal and historical struggle of the integrated relationship between racism and classicism in America. The trials and tribulations of a poor, large, White Irish family living in a Boston housing project clearly reflect the exact same life experiences of other poor ethnic/racial groups trying to make it and survive in this land of promised opportunity.Although the South Boston Bulger gangster phenomenon serves as a Greek chorus to the times, this passionate family story itself totally overshadows that scourge and underscores the unending challenges, desperation, and heartache of living poor in America.Adjust the color lens and, historically, you witness how political "saviors" prey on the vulnerabilities of the innocent and uninformed...all in the name of making America great again.All Souls takes place in the late 70's when the issue of busing and desegregation dominated Boston as well as national headlines. The reputation of the "hub of the educational universe", as an overtly racist enclave, intensified greatly at that time and still lingers today.This worthwhile novel, itself, is actually timeless in its themes of family crisis, intervention, and survival.All Souls is an excellent vehicle to use in high school and college classrooms to encourage discussions on the impact of racism and classicism in today's America and the future implications of its continued course.Definitely a thumbs up selection!

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