All Souls: A Family Story from Southie

Michael MacDonald's "All Souls" is a beautiful example of "this-and-that" writing. His coming-of-age memoir of growing up in the rabidly Irish-Catholic enclave of South Boston during the transitional 70s and 80s (drugs, integration, development, gentrification), neither excuses nor glorifies his neighborhood's appalling problems. He simply lays it all out in graphic, oftentimes violent, storytelling images. His style is more journalistic than memoirist: This is what happened - as he knew it or saw it, but not as he felt it - and that was that.

Although I loved this book, I only gave it four out of five stars since it wasn't originally conceived, even though MacDonald is an original voice, and was poorly edited. "All Souls" was released more than two years after the 1998 independent film "Southie," starring Donnie Wahlberg, (the movie was shot in South Boston in 1997), which introduced many of the same literal and figurative ideas found in MacDonald's book.

Perhaps MacDonald realized that along with all of South Boston's other lost chances - of lives, futures, hopes, traditions, neighborhoods and families - that the chance to tell their own stories was also being taken away by "outsiders."

MacDonald deftly uses that victim mentality - that Southies see things as being taken away when in reality they are being left behind because they refuse to adapt and change - as the central theme for his story. South Boston was a proverbial case of "pride goeth before a fall." In MacDonald's telling, it was a hard pride and a hard fall and one from which Southie has yet to recover.

I couldn't put it down I was so enthralled by the story. Having worked in an office building less than a mile away and driving by the Old Colony Project every day I was breathless reading this. It is so well written and so raw. I was so happy that the author has let us see his little piece of the world and opened my eyes up.

I have also talked to friends from Southie about this book and it seems to hit a really raw nerve with some. One coworker told me it was "all lies he made up to make Southie look bad". I find that hard to believe, but it's a great read.

I lived in Southie my whole life and this book is a perfect description of how life in southie was. I was born in 1985, years after busing and segregation was over. But the old-timers from Southie haven't changed their ways! You can still walk around and see them standing around with their shamrock tattoos and scally caps on thinking they can take on the world just because they're from southie! People recognize Southie people right away! This book is great and I think the author did a very good job giving people some insight on how life was in Southie!

We got the book on tape and listen to it in the car driving during our vacation. This was my son's summer reading book, he's a senior in high school. The entire family enjoyed the book. My husband and I grew up in central Massachusetts, but both of us remember hearing on the news about the busing and Whitey. Michael Patrick MacDonald does an excellent job telling his story. You feel like you know him and his family and sympathize to all that happen to them and this community. The author turned his troubling youth into a positive as an adult and how he helped and is still helping this community and others in Boston.

I guess where I grew up in Ohio years ago I was living under a rock. I had no idea these problems existed at the time or for some years later until a good friend I workd with who grew up with the Author and turned me on to the book and the problem - well I get it now. This is a sad tale of America in a major city where discrimination was more than skin color but ethnicity to a degree unimaginable to me. What a story and one that opened my eyes and will make me better. Great great book