Product Description: A breakaway best seller since its first printing, All Souls takes us deep into Michael Patrick MacDonald'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 like his Ma, a mini-skirted, accordion-playing single mother who endures the deaths of four of her eleven children...read more

MacDonald's first book told of the loss of the author's four siblings to the violence, poverty, and gangsterism of Boston's Irish-American ghetto. The question 'How did you get out?' has haunted him ever since. This narrative of reinvention begins with the young MacDonald's first forays outside the soul-crushing walls of Southie's Old Colony housing project. In greater Boston and eventually New York's East Village, he becomes part of the club scene, providing a 1980s social history and a powerful glimpseof what punk music was for him: a lifesaving form of subversion and self-education. Yet family tragedies eventually draw him home again, to a devastating breakdown induced by trauma and guilt. He meets his father for the first time, as a corpse. Finally,two trips to Ireland, the first as an alienated young man, the second with his extraordinary 'Ma,' are healing journeys unlike any other in Irish-American literature.--From publisher description.A continuation of the author's memoir of growing up poor in Boston's Irish-American ghetto describes his first forays outside of Southie's Old Colony housing project, his traumatic breakdown, and his two healing journeys to Ireland.

The author of Easter Rising recounts growing up in a poor, insular Irish neighborhood of South Boston, a community rocked by the organized crime world of gangster Whitey Bulger, riots, and poverty, and remembers the four brothers he lost to violence, in a gritty new version of the best-selling memoir. Reprint.