All Souls Audiobook By Michael Patrick MacDonald cover art

All Souls

A Family Story from Southie

 Preview

Audible Standard 30-day free trial

Try Standard free
Select 1 audiobook a month from our entire collection of titles.
Yours as long as you’re a member.
Get unlimited access to bingeable podcasts.
Standard auto renews for $8.99 a month after 30 days. Cancel anytime.

All Souls

By: Michael Patrick MacDonald
Narrated by: Michael Patrick MacDonald
Try Standard free

$8.99 a month after 30 days. Cancel anytime.

Buy for $25.20

Buy for $25.20

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."

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. Biographies & Memoirs Cultural & Regional United States Boston State & Local Americas Sociology

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
Authentic Perspective • Heartbreaking Reality • Immaculate Performance • Engaging Storytelling • Gritty Memoir

Highly rated for:

All stars
Most relevant
An incredibly moving memoir that will guarantee to have you in deep thought. Narrated by the author himself with an amazingly authentic performance.

Powerful

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
This review touched my soul in ways I could not imagine before reading. The performance was immaculate, the book itself was so moving.

One of the most moving non fiction books I’ve ever read.

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Being a young person in New England and only having heard one or two vague stories about the “combat zone” , this was the first time that I heard anyone’s account in detail about life in South Boston during the racial conflict. Definitely worth the read. What an inspiring individual the author is. A shining example of perseverance.

Fantastic read. Enlightening.

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
I have read it 3 times now and it gets better every time. Daring, heartbreaking and inspiring. Thank you

Powerful and Profound

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
All Souls is a painful book worth reading. It full of Boston nostalgia and hard truths and is a truly visceral experience to read.

this book broke me in the best way

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
See more reviews