kevlog's Full Review: Michael Patrick MacDonald - All Souls: A Family St...
Michael Patrick Macdonald has been in the news quite a bit lately in Boston. Susan Sarandon has expressed an interest in playing his mother in the film version of his recent bestseller "All Souls," and many others in Hollywood are scrambling for a piece of the action. I had the pleasure of listening to Michael read from his book not too long ago, and was blown away.
'All Souls' is the story of his childhood spent in the mostly Irish projects of South Boston. It's a story about his family, about forced busing in the early 70's, about Whitey Bulger and the mob, and about how all of these things affected Michael and his family growing up. We learn about his eccentric accordion playing mother who always seems to end up with abusive men. We learn about his siblings and their struggles to survive in Southie while avoiding Bulger's Winter Hill gang and lives of crime. Sadly, not all his siblings avoided the life of the streets. Macdonald is one of ten children, and he sadly has only 5 living siblings. One brother was murdered, found stuffed in the trunk of a car. One committed suicide. Another died as an infant.
What's interesting here is to see Southie from Macdonald's perspective at the time. He was a kid of around 8 years. It was exciting for him to watch the news trucks roll in as his playmates hurled rocks at passing school buses during enforced bussing. He enjoyed the camaraderie of the project life, where everyone knew everyone's business, even if it was dealing drugs out of the corner apartment.
"We thought we were in the best place in the world in this neighborhood, in the all-Irish housing projects where everyone claimed to be Irish even if his name was Spinnoli. We were proud to be from here, as proud as we were to be Irish. We didn't want to own the problems that took the lives of my brothers and of so many others like them: poverty, crime, drugs — those were black things that happened in the ghettos of Roxbury. Southie was Boston's proud Irish neighborhood."
I loved this book. Much of it is heartwrenching, but Macdonald, like his mother as we learn in the book, is a great storyteller.
Sadly, in this memoir, these stories are all true.
This searing coming-of-age memoir is set in Southie where gangster Whitey Bulger runs the drug business, and class and racial violence erupt in respon...More at Barnes & Noble.com
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