All Souls: A Family Story from Southie

This searing coming-of-age memoir is set in "Southie" where gangster Whitey Bulger runs the drug business, and class and racial violence erupt in response to forced busing in the 1970s. MacDonald loses four siblings to drugs, poverty, and violence, and eventually attempts to transcend his grief as he becomes an activist in the Southie he can't help but love. "If you were charmed by Frank McCourt's Angela's Ashes . . . try All Souls, Michael Patrick Mac-Donald's guileless and powerful memoir of precarious life and early death in Boston's Irish ghetto. . . . With its probes of crooked politicians, bad cops, and layers of racism, All Souls easily breaks its regional and ethnic boundaries." -R. Z. Sheppard, Time