
All Souls
A Family Story from Southie
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Narrated by:
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Michael Patrick MacDonald
The anti-busing riots of 1974 forever changed Southie, Boston's working-class Irish community, branding it as a violent, racist enclave. Michael Patrick MacDonald grew up in Southie's Old Colony housing project. He describes the way this world within a world felt to the troubled yet keenly gifted observer he was even as a child: "[as if] we were protected, as if the whole neighborhood was watching our backs for threats, watching for all the enemies we could never really define."
But the threats - poverty, drugs, a shadowy gangster world - were real. MacDonald lost four of his siblings to violence and poverty. 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".
We meet Ma, Michael's mini-skirted, accordian-playing, usually single mother who cares for her children - there are eventually 11 - through a combination of high spirits and inspired "getting over". 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.
But too soon Southie becomes a place controlled by resident gangster Whitey Bulger, later revealed to be an FBI informant even as he ran the drug culture that Southie supposedly never had. It was a world primed for the escalation of class violence - and then, with deadly and sickening inevitability, of racial violence that swirled around forced busing. MacDonald, eight years old when the riots hit, gives an explosive account of the asphalt warfare. He tells of feeling "part of it all, part of something bigger than I'd ever imagined, part of something that was on the national news every night".
Within a few years - a sequence laid out in All Souls with mesmerizing urgency - the neighborhood's collapse is echoed by the MacDonald family's tragedies. All but destroyed by grief and by the Southie code that doesn't allow him to feel it, MacDonald gets out. His work as a peace activist, first in the all-Black neighborhoods of nearby Roxbury, then back to the Southie he can't help but love, is the powerfully redemptive close to a story that will leave readers utterly shaken and changed.
©2007 Michael Patrick MacDonald (P)2021 Beacon PressListeners also enjoyed...




















Critic reviews
"All Souls is an American family story you've never imagined, an incendiary, moving book that startles on nearly every page." (Kirkus Reviews)
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Fantastic read. Enlightening.
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Powerful
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Powerful and Profound
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this book broke me in the best way
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A+++❤ Very Satisfied!
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We are more alike than we are different.
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I felt the telling of the story was engaging and I didn’t want to stop listening to Michael tell his stories in his authentic Southie way. It was both heart warming and heart breaking, a fantastic telling of an era in the greater Irish story.
An Irish Tale of a Time and Place
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Wonderful reading
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Deep. Heartfelt. Funny at times.
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Must read!
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