All Souls: A Family Story from Southie

by Michael Patrick MacDonald

(Beacon Press)

The anti-busing riots of 1974 forever changed South Boston’s working class Irish community, branding it as a violent, racist enclave. MacDonald grew up in 'Southie’s' Old Colony housing project and describes the way this world within a world felt to this troubled yet keenly gifted observer. All Souls is testimony to lives lost too early to violence, drugs, and poverty, and the story of how a place so filled with pain could still be “the best place in the world.”