Reviews

• Profoundly moving

  A beautiful and deeply moving book about the tragedy of the gang controlled neighbourhood overran with drugs and bound by a self defeating code of silence. MacDonald writes poignantly and candidly about his love hate relationship with the rough and tumble Irish projects in Southie and how they impacted his family's lives.

• While this is a fantastic book in many

  While this is a fantastic book in many, many respects and I found it compelling and couldn't put it down for several days until I reached the other shore, I'm sure it wasn't written for readers to simply enjoy as an interesting and oft-times amusing piece of Irish American social history. The story for me is essentially about what it takes to survive in a society created on the basis of division, exclusion and powerlessness. Ma MacDonald is a fighter to the core. I knew her in the lives of many other women here in Derry who fought to survive and to allow their families to survive during the long troubles. One such woman is my wife's mother, Maureen English, who lost two sons in 1981 and 1985, She died in 2005 and until very shortly before her death she fought with great dignity to keep everybody else going in their daily lives. I always wonder how women like Ma MacDonald and Maureen English did it. The storyline of this book is written more from the heart than from the head and ends in the spirit of fighting against all the odds for a better life for the left-behind and marginalised. Well done Michael Patrick MacDonald; I'm sure you're ma is proud of you!

• Five Stars

  Very well written true story.

• memoir, sociology, living history, great characters -- lots of reasons to read this excellent memoir

  It's taken me a few weeks to digest All Souls after finishing it. It's a very good memoir, and of a time & place that have not been memorialized from this perspective (as far as I know, although there is some great lit. that deals w/ it). Apart from the excellent narrative writing, this story of an Irish-American lad in the 70s-80s of South Boston is worthwhile for some other reasons. If you need no other, the characters are sublime! And real. What a cast Southie offered! As MacDonald mentions, when we think of school desegregation battles, we think of the South. Most of us don't know, or recall, that much about the vitriolic and violent anti-bussing battles of the 70s in Boston. A slice of American life in the 20th century for real. As I write, I'm put in mind of Angela's Ashes and I'm thinking about enculturated values of resistance, clannishness, and disempowerment. I'm going to assume that many of the folks who peopled the small homes and city housing that MacDonald writes about were one-to-three generations off the peat; small holders or landless sons, women without opportunities, impoverished and beaten down. For whatever reason, they didn't get a good foothold on "The American Dream" when they came here. Poverty, welfare, lack of ownership, ignorance, lack of birth control (thanks to the times and the Roman Catholic church), joblessness -- then drugs, organized crime and guns -- didn't float them upward. (And another reason likely being that there were 10s of thousands of Irish who immigrated to America, many of them going no further than the port of Boston. With the prejudice against Irish immigrants, there were only so many jobs available. The tradition of getting a "good" job with the police or fire dept., if one could, continues to this day.) The MacDonalds were a seemingly perfect microcosm of the times and the Irish-American history of immigration. Some got away, some bettered their lives, some got pulled under. I want to say that I am impressed by Michael MacDonald's ability to report as he did, especially considering his age when he wrote the book and the multiple psychological traumas he had endured. He never leaves his characters, to confidentially dis them to the reader. He is assiduously careful not to judge; he places his characters in their contexts and lets you react. He does not preach. He does not attempt to explain overmuch. There are so many ways a person who had experienced and witnessed what he has could adopt a mask as he wrote -- disingenuously or subconsciously -- to distance himself from the story or to try to place himself in a justifiable context. I do not feel that he did. In this, the book's an excellent example of 1st-person reportage, living history, of which I am a big fan. There are 100s of ways for we humans to suffer, whether it's the janjaweed or Whitey Bulger (the Irish gangster responsible for many of the drugs and murders in So. Boston in the 70s. Thank God they got that a-hole, just a sad little geriatric when they caught up to him… the banality of evil!) I might have liked MacDonald to explain or narrate, though, just a bit more about WHY the Irish despised the blacks in the next neighborhood so much. I'm left to assume it's the old story of the beleaguered seeking power by uniting against a common, and also disempowered, enemy. I was also taken with the self-mythologizing of Southie -- which I guess occurred for the same reason. When you ain't got much, you can still claim you have your dignity, even if it's a flimsy and self-destructive sense of honor. An excellent read, the kind you read while brushing your teeth because you don't want to put it down. Hugs to the MacDonalds for persevering without poisoning their souls.

• Michael Patrick MacDonald All Souls

  This is one of the best books I have ever read. Michael Patrick MacDonald lets us know, against the run of descriptions of life in Boston, what it was like to grow up in poverty and under the control of drug gangsters. He showed also how brave families fought against it. He is proof of how, despite multiple disadvantages, a person of strength and character can come through. I find it relevant in Northern ireland today where there are similar problems, particularly in loyalist communities, and where there are those who are keeping good people down, both by starting youngsters on drugs and making money from them and by claiming that they are better thant others - our great wee country mentality. In the meantime the poor are funding the lifestyles of those who hold them down and the "leaders" are apparently held in esteem by our authorities, police and government. just as in South Boston.

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