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. Rocked by Whitey Bulger's crime schemes and busing riots, MacDonald's Southie is populated by sharply hewn characters like his Ma, a miniskirted, accordion-playing single mother who endures the deaths of four of her eleven children. Nearly suffocated by his grief and his community's code of silence, MacDonald tells his family story here with gritty but moving honesty.

I strongly recommend this book to anyone and everyone in our American society. The story had to be told: it's poverty and class, folks, not race! Whites, blacks, Hispanics, Asians, etc., whatever ethnic or racial group there is, those at the poor end of the specrum will suffer until society changes."All Souls" teaches us that. Hopefully we'll learn from this marvelous work, and things will improve.

Like Michael, I'm someone born and brought up in a Southie housing project(The Old Harbor Village), albeit some 25 years earlier. I was luckier than Michael and his siblings because I had two parents, and drugs and guns were virtually nonexistent in Southie's projects in the 40's, 50's, and early 60's when I was there. However, I can identify with and testify to the existence of "Southie Pride", and the insular nature of "The Town", that "us versus the rest of the world" mentality. Combine that with the forced busing saga produced by a self-serving state legislature which passed laws to insure their lily-white towns wouldn't be affected by busing, and a judge from Wellesley who didn't have a clue, along with extreme poverty, organized crime controlling Southie ,an incompetent and/or corrupt police force, a similarly corrupt local FBI contingent, guns, drugs, and booze pouring in uninhibited by law enforcement, and lo and behold, you have the perfect formula for the disaster that ensued, the anger, hate, despair, misery, grief, the premature deaths, suicides, murders, ODs' etc, the exacerbation of Southie's natural introversion! Thanks to this wonderful book, the story is out there,and the healing process has begun.

I really hope all of America reads the book, especially those non-Southies who live in Boston and its environs. I guarantee you will all change your perspective of Southie afterwards. I would also recommend that "All Souls" be mandatory in the high school English courses of the Boston Public School system, as well as those across the country. There'a a major lesson to be learned here.

Michael MacDonald..Thank you for your story, and I'll be waiting for to write more!

56 of 63 found the following review helpful:


hitting home  Jun 29, 2000 By saundra thomas
Wow! I just finished reading the book...it brought a tear to my eye. As an African-American woman four years older tham Michael, born in the same housing project as he...the story hit home. I commend Mr. MacDonald for his poignant memoir. I grew up in Roslindale, at the time a predominately Irish-Catholic neighborhood, where I lived in fear of the "Southie" types. My family even experienced first-hand being chased out of Southie when I was a teen. My leaving Boston after high school was pretty much a reaction to the racism that permeated the city at that time. It was refreshing to get insight to the "other side" through Mr. MacDonald's brutal honesty. My heart does not bleed for his family or the people in the "best place in the world", but it does help me to understand the pathology that divide and conquer creates. And how when all is said and done and people have died...be all have much more in common than we'd like to think. It also has inspired me to tell my own story and look forward to more tales from Southie from this sensitive, daring writer. Thanks for the insight and memories!

22 of 23 found the following review helpful:


Angela's Ashes Stateside  Nov 09, 2000 By Kate Cone
For a young man in his thirties, Michael Patrick MacDonaldexhibits a rare strong, intelligent, probing voice in thisautobiography of his childhood in the forced-busing 1970's SouthBoston.

Readers learn that poverty and tragedy, caused by or atleast exacerbated by Southie's own destructive code of silence and theFBI's refusal to prosecute the 'hood's mafia chief/purveyor ofdrugs/booze/weapons, end up devastating Southie and the author'sfamily. He loses 4 siblings to crime or discrimination.

This is NOTa depressing book. It is uplifting in the sense that Angela's Asheswas: the author writes most of the time from his childhood perspective-- one that doesn't know any other world but the one in which he isliving.

The family went out of their way to NOT look poor, to thepoint where they would buy shop-lifted designer clothes from a Southie"fence" so that they could look as fashionable as everyoneelse, despite the fact that their mother was a "career"welfare mom. MacDonald has said in interviews that in large part hisbook is about the denial of their poverty and immersion in thedrug/weapon culture he wants readers to understand. There's much, muchmore.

I am a Masters student in American & New England Studiesand had to read this book for a class called Ethnicity in America. Ifyou have one book to choose to give you a perspective on how the Irish"assimilated" to the Boston scene, choose this one. Youwon't be able to put it down.

16 of 16 found the following review helpful:


Only Pawns In Their Game  Feb 29, 2000 By Thomas S. Costello
Claude Brown told it from an African American perspective thirty years ago. Now we have it from an Irish American perspective. Poor people, regardless of race, are used, manipulated and pitted against each other to the advantage of those in power. Still, in communities crushed down by poverty, crime, corruption, alcohol and drug abuse, some people will not let humanity be crushed out of them. As Viktor Frankel observed in the concentration camps some people will survive no matter how oppressive the conditions. I am glad Michael MacDonald survived to remind us of that fact again. This is a painful book to read. I found it compelling in a way I don't with Angela's Ashes (which I have my education students read). This is an important book and should not be considered as an Irish genre work any more than Brown's is Black genre. They both speak to the human condition in a way we need to hear more frequently, for our own humanity's sake.

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