All Souls: A Family Story from Southie

I have just finished this powerful homage to one man's family. What an incredible experience it was to read this story of grief and survival. Thank goodness Macdonald had the courage to share this moving story of his family. It must have been so difficult for him to write about these experiences, and I hope in the retelling he felt some peace. By being so courageous, he has given the reader such a gift.

I read this book several years ago, back in 2001, but am just now reviewing it due to the current media frenzy over "The Brothers Bulger", by Howie Carr, which I am one third of the way through and enjoying immensely.

It is rare for me to read an entire book in one evening, but this was one of them. It is ever rarer for me to cry me eyes out at least a half dozen times in one night, but the night I read "All Souls" was also one of them. For anyone from Boston, the area around the city, or anyone Irish-American and interested in the history of our people with all its warts and false heroes, this is the book to read.

As a child growing up in the suburbs of Boston, with a father who grew up tough on the streets of Medford but who made it out to a professional career, I never knew how good I had it as a youth until I read "All Souls". This could have been my family, more or less: burying son after son/brother after brother due to crime, mental illness, alcoholism, and so on.

Thanks to you Michael Patrick MacDonald; I will remember this book forever.

This book was a good learning experience for me. It showed how poverty can create a cascade effect of crime, drugs, death, depression, etc. It was an interesting story of a white, urban, Irish neighborhood with racial tension and its effects on a family. It was almost like the neighborhood should have been a character in itself. It was well-written, with good flow. It kept me interested. I'm bummed I'm done reading it. Michael MacDonald is a good story-teller. It's a story that is important for people to read for diversity education.

All Souls, the nonfiction novel about growing up in Southie through the eyes of a kid who lived there, is a great novel about the trials and tribulations of a family and a community throughout the years. One is able to learn a lot about the neighborhood and all that in encompassed, not only through research or the outside looking in, but an "insider's perspective," which in this case makes all the difference. This is a stirring book filled with so much that one almost wishes that it were a novel; the reality of it, however, is so striking that it flies by as a read and one can't help but read on and on--the ending is well developed and written, too--not to cliché.

What started out as a dull sociology reading became one of my favorite books (and I'm not usually into non-fiction). Heart-wrenching and gripping from someone who is not prone to be moved to tears by a book very often.

A must-read!