All Souls: A Family Story from Southie
A breakaway bestseller since it first appeared in 1999, All Souls takes us deep into Michael Patrick MacDonald’s Southie, the proudly insular neighborhood with the highest concentration of white poverty in America. Rocked by Whitey Bulger’s drug schemes and school busing riots, MacDonald’s Southie is populated by sharply hewn characters like his Ma, a miniskirted accordion-playing single mother who endures the deaths of four of her eleven children. Nearly suffocated by his grief and Southie’s code of silence, MacDonald tells his family story with gritty honesty and radiant insight. By turns explosive and touching, All Souls ultimately shares a powerful message of hope, renewal, and redemption.
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read by Michael
Easter Rising: A Memoir of Roots and Rebellion
In Easter Rising Michael Patrick MacDonald tells the story of how he escaped Old Colony housing project, and learned to live again. Desperate to avoid the "normal" life of crime and drugs that surrounds him, Michael crosses the bridge into the bigger world and reinvents himself in the burgeoning punk rock movement downtown. At nineteen MacDonald escapes further, to Paris and then London. Out of money, he contacts his Irish immigrant grandfather — who offers a loan after securing a promise that Michael will visit Ireland. It is this reluctant journey "home" that reconciles MacDonald with his neighborhood, his family, and his heritage — and the real way forward. A roots journey laced with both rebellion and profound redemption.