All Souls: A Family Story from Southie - Michael Patrick MacDonald

A breakaway bestseller since its first printing, All Souls takes us deep into Michael PatrickMacDonald's Southie, the proudly insular neighborhood with the highest concentration of white poverty in America.

Rocked by Whitey Bulger's crime schemes and busing riots, MacDonald's Southie is populated by sharply hewn characters.We meet Ma, Michael's mini-skirted, accordian-playing, single motherwho endures the deaths of four of her eleven children.

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. Nearly suffocated by his grief and his community's code of silence, MacDonald tells his family story here with gritty but moving honesty. 

All Souls is heartbreaking 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."