All Souls is the written equivalent of an Irish wake, where revelers dance and sing the dead person’s praises. In that same style, the book leavens tragedy with dashes of humor but preserves the heartbreaking details.”—Brent Staples, New York Times Book Review
The National Bestselling memoir that takes us deep into the South Boston housing projects during one of the city’s most tumultuous times in history and tells the story of his family struggling the overcome the poverty, crime, addiction, and incarceration that overtook the neighborhood
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. We meet Ma, Michael’s mini-skirted, accordian-playing, single mother who endures the deaths of 4 of her 11 children. 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.
Nearly suffocated by his grief and his community’s code of silence, MacDonald tells his family story here with gritty but moving honesty. All Souls is heartbreaking 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.”
“[A] rare and compelling book . . . Highly passionate.”
—Chicago Tribune
“Harrowing.”
—The New Yorker
“All Souls leavens tragedy with dashes of humor but preserves the heartbreaking details.”
—Brent Staples, The New York Times Book Review
“Time may take away a lot of things, but it can’t take away our stories. Twenty-five years ago Michael Patrick MacDonald wrote one for the ages. All Souls is a book that you will carry everywhere, most especially in that eternal rag and bone shop of the heart.”
—Colum McCann, author of American Mother
“This extraordinary book is so many things at once. A tender, shocking yet at times hilarious account of a beleaguered family and community; a scorching indictment of the forces that conspired against them; an elegy to lost brothers; a rallying call to hope. It is hands down the best memoir I have ever read.”
—Louise Kennedy, author of Trespasses
Author’s Note
1. All Souls’ Night
2. Freedoms
3. Ghetto Heaven
4. Fight the Power
5. Looking for Whitey
6. August
7. Holy Water
8. Stand-Up Guy
9. Exile
10. Justice
11. Vigil
Afterword
Acknowledgments