All Souls
A Family Story from Southie
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All Souls
Narrated by:
Michael Patrick MacDonald
Buy Now for £13.99
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Narrated by:
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Michael Patrick MacDonald
About this listen
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."
We meet Ma, Michael's mini-skirted, accordian-playing, usually single mother who cares for her children—there are eventually eleven—through a combination of high spirits and inspired "getting over." And there are Michael's older siblings—Davey, sweet artist-dreamer; Kevin, child genius of scam; and Frankie, Golden Gloves boxer and neighborhood hero—whose lives are high-wire acts played out in a world of poverty and pride.
But too soon Southie becomes a place controlled by resident gangster Whitey Bulger, later revealed to be an FBI informant even as he ran the drug culture that Southie supposedly never had. It was a world primed for the escalation of class violence-and then, with deadly and sickening inevitability, of racial violence that swirled around forced busing. MacDonald, eight years old when the riots hit, gives an explosive account of the asphalt warfare. He tells of feeling "part of it all, part of something bigger than I'd ever imagined, part of something that was on the national news every night."
Within a few years-a sequence laid out in All Souls with mesmerizing urgency-the neighborhood's collapse is echoed by the MacDonald family's tragedies. All but destroyed by grief and by the Southie code that
doesn't allow him to feel it, MacDonald gets out. His work as a peace activist, first in the all-Black neighborhoods of nearby Roxbury, then back to the Southie he can't help but love, is the powerfully redemptive close to a story that will leave readers utterly shaken and changed.
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Critic reviews
All Souls is an American family story you've never imagined, "an incendiary, moving book that startles on nearly every page." --Kirkus Reviews
Even though I thought I knew his story I didn’t really until I listened to it and the fact he read it himself shows just how good he is at what he does.
Never underestimate the number of people this man has helped with both his writing and teaching but most of all his honesty.
This book is about how we deal with adversity and shows how through activism we can bring change and hope it saves families going through what we did.
This is a real man telling a real story as it is.
From Boston to Belfast
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