All Souls: A Family Story from Southie

Moving, depressing, but with the tiniest glimmer of hope, this book isn’t for the faint of heart. Macdonald describes the dark underside, the fear, and the degrading poverty of growing up in one of the worst housing projects in South Boston.

The book is somewhat disjointed and the individual stories are often fragmented. But the throughline of abuse by officials, by criminals, and often by each other, carries the book forward. This reader was torn between sorrow and fury at the system that seemed designed for produce failing families and crumbling neighborhoods.

Near the end the author describes a good-sized group of kids, armed with sticks and rocks and bats, chasing a hapless raccoon who had mistakenly wandered into Old Colony. show more MacDonald muses about how great it is to see “the kids having a grand time.”
No. No it’s not. It’s just another case of mindless group violence aimed at some hapless, powerless creature. The raccoon escapes, but that doesn’t erase the extremely unpleasant picture of the truth of Lyndon Johnson’s old idea about giving people something to look down on so they’ll feel better about themselves.

A sad and ultimately depressing book—but good grief, what the people suffered, and why, is just unconscionable. show less

I love narrative non-fiction more than any other genre. By far, this is one of my favorite, most memorable books. One thing I always remember from the author as he recounts his poor childhood in South Boston was how much the neighborhood kids used to love getting firefighters to come out to their block. The reason they were so fascinated? "They were the only men we knew who had jobs." MacDonald's traumatic account of his upbringing is soul-stirring and enlightening.

For all the time following the career of Whitey Bulger and re-watching The Town I was interested in an insider's memoir account of growing up in the Southie Irish-American neighborhood. The main arc is insular, ethnic pride and community eroded year by year by guns and drugs. Multiple tragedies to the author's own family result in nudging him to an activist role and and key role in a successful gun buyback program. I thought it was particularly interesting to read of the reaction in his community to the forced school integration of the 70s and the BHA under the tenure of Boston Mayor John F. Collins (1960–1968) segregating the public housing developments in the city, moving black families into the development at Columbia Point while show more reserving developments in South Boston for white families who started refusing assignment to the Columbia Point project by the early 1960s. This seems to only strengthen short-sighted racism (maybe giving strength to criminals like Bulger) and then the disruption and seething discontent of trying to reverse this through policy. show less

All Souls is exhausting and draining and I would recommend it to anyone. MacDonald's writing is hardly poetic, which only adds to the weight of the book's realism. It reads like a brutal and bloody call for social justice in one of the most honest and least political voices imaginable. I feel like this book will haunt me for a while.

Books about white urban poverty are underrepresented in the literature, so All Souls: Family Story from Southie helps fill an important niche. Well-written, personal, and compelling, MacDonald does an excellent job of bringing his family and their close-knit neighborhood to life. His "view from the inside" of Southie provides an excellent counterbalance to the media characterizations of the neighborhood: Southie was not working class: it was poor. It was not drug-free: it was a swamp of addicts and dealers. "Getting Out" was necessary to make it, yet if one left one was no longer an insider.

What makes this book a 3-star volume is its lack of contextualization and its hands-off approach to the exercise of agency. It seems almost as show more though the author is concerned that his words will be taken less seriously if he makes it sound as though things are, or have the capacity to be, better. show less

This Boston read reveals a side of the city that you simply can't know as a transplant. As with many books that are written by people with fascinating stories, rather than by writers, the book sometimes reads like a list of happenings, rather than a contoured narrative, but MacDonald's story is remarkable.

He grew up in South Boston and Jamaica Plain in a sprawling Irish family. The story focuses on his family, but happens to collide with the history of Boston, the riots during integration, or 'busing' as its known in Boston, and the consumption of Southie from the outside in by the mafia, the still-at-large Whitey Bulger in particular.

The MacDonald clan does not fare well; four of the six siblings do not survive childhood intact. Not show more an uplifting read, but an enlightening one. show less

To put it simply, All Souls is the memoir of Michael Patrick McDonald, who was one of nine siblings that grew up in the projects of South Boston. What makes it not so simple is that nearly half of Michael's siblings don’t make it to adulthood because of the rampant drug use and astonishing violence of the area and the time.
Anyone that lives in Boston should read this story- the busing riots of the 70's are a black mark on the city's soul, but it's something each and every citizen should know about. Anyone whose family has been affected by drugs should read this book- the way Whitey's drugs rip apart this family and this town is unbelievable, and the way that McDonald's family and the people of Southie continue to ignore it is almost show more worse. Pretty much everyone will take something away from this book- even if it's only a realization of how good you had it. show less