About this item
The anti-busing riots of 1974 forever changed Southie, Boston's working class Irish community, branding it as a violent, racist enclave. Michael Patrick MacDonald grew up in Southie's Old Colony housing project. 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 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.
About the Author
Michael Patrick MacDonald was born in Boston in 1966 and grew up in South Boston??s Old Colony housing project. He helped launch many of Boston??s anti violence initiatives, including gun-buyback programs and the South Boston Vigil Group which served to give voice to the survivors of violence and the drug trade in that neighborhood. He continues to work nationally with survivor families and young people in the anti-violence movement. His first book, All Souls won the American Book Award. He is also the recipient of a New England Literary Lights Award, and the Myers Center Outstanding Book Award administered by the Myers Center for the Study of Bigotry and Human Rights in North America. His second book, the highly acclaimed memoir Easter Rising, was published in 2006. He has written guest columns for the Boston Globe and is currently writing the screenplay of All Souls for director Ron Shelton. Michael has been awarded an Anne Cox Chambers Fellowship at the MacDowell Colony, a Bellagio Center Fellowship through the Rockefeller Foundation, and residencies at Blue Mountain Center and Djerassi Artist Residency Program. He currently lives in Brooklyn, New York, and devotes all of his time to writing and public speaking on topics ranging from 'Race and Class in America' to 'Trauma, Healing, and Social Change. '
