{"id":102095,"date":"2017-03-31T14:10:55","date_gmt":"2017-03-31T18:10:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/sph\/?page_id=102095"},"modified":"2023-01-16T19:24:40","modified_gmt":"2023-01-17T00:24:40","slug":"sph-reads-2017","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/sph\/students\/getting-started-at-busph\/sph-reads\/sph-reads-2017\/","title":{"rendered":"SPH Reads 2017"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"all-souls-book-cover\"Told from the point-of-view of the author, Michael Patrick MacDonald, All Souls: A Family Story from Southie<\/em>, is a story of a young man growing up in the heart of South Boston (aka \u201cSouthie\u201d), Boston\u2019s working class Irish community, and proudly insular neighborhood with the highest concentration of white poverty in America.<\/p>\n

The anti-busing riots of 1974 forever changed Southie, branding it as a violent, racist enclave. MacDonald grew up in Southie\u2019s 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: \u201c[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.\u201d<\/p>\n

But the threats – poverty, drugs, a shadowy gangster world – were real. MacDonald lost four of his siblings to violence and poverty.\u00a0 All but destroyed by grief and by the Southie code that doesn\u2019t allow him to feel it, MacDonald gets out.\u00a0 All Souls<\/em> is heart-breaking testimony to lives lost too early, and the story of how a place so filled with pain could still be \u201cthe best place in the world.\u201d\u00a0 The book illuminates the connections between the author\u2019s family tragedies and the social, economic, and political forces that shaped Boston during the 1970s and 1980s.<\/p>\n

Please pick up your copy of All Souls: A Family Story from Southie<\/em> from any of the following locations:<\/p>\n