SPH Reads 2017.
Told from the point-of-view of the author, Michael Patrick MacDonald, All Souls: A Family Story from Southie, is a story of a young man growing up in the heart of South Boston (aka “Southie”), Boston’s working class Irish community, and proudly insular neighborhood with the highest concentration of white poverty in America.
The anti-busing riots of 1974 forever changed Southie, branding it as a violent, racist enclave. MacDonald grew up in Southie’s Old Colony housing project, and he describes the way this world within a world felt to the troubled yet keenly gifted observer he was even as a child: “[as if] we were protected, as if the whole neighborhood was watching our backs for threats, watching for all the enemies we could never really define.”
But the threats – poverty, drugs, a shadowy gangster world – were real. MacDonald lost four of his siblings to violence and poverty. All but destroyed by grief and by the Southie code that doesn’t allow him to feel it, MacDonald gets out. All Souls is heart-breaking testimony to lives lost too early, and the story of how a place so filled with pain could still be “the best place in the world.” The book illuminates the connections between the author’s family tragedies and the social, economic, and political forces that shaped Boston during the 1970s and 1980s.
Please pick up your copy of All Souls: A Family Story from Southie from any of the following locations:
- Reception desk -2nd Floor Talbot Building
- Graduate Student Life- 208C Talbot Building
- Reception desk- 3rd Floor CrossTown
*New to 2017
New to SPH Reads this year is the #SPHReads hashtag campaign. Please post a picture of yourself with the book on your social media accounts with the hashtag #SPHReads to follow the SPH community as we enjoy the book together.
Available at most bookstores, including Amazon and Barnes and Noble.