Rating: 
Summary: knocked my socks off
Review: After I read this book, i promptly loaned my copy out as a must-read and recommended it to everyone else i couldn't loan my copy to. I originally purchased it because I thought it would be a nice blend of Angela's Ashes and Common Ground - hoo boy, it's way more than that. This book is so complex: about family, about community, about Southie ... about a mother and her family, a brother among brothers and sisters ... struggle, fun, identity, street smarts, humor, toughness, pride ... lit candles, spike heels ... And Michael's writing invites you into all of this rather than lecturing at you. Like a reader above, i attended a book signing (without socks - see title) and agree that Michael has a Gift - in writing and in speaking, he draws people into his world and experience in an almost magical way. Thank you, Michael, for sharing this story. Look forward to your talk in Cambridge.
Rating:
Summary: A Tear In The Eye
Review: This book has worked its way into my mind and heart and has given me an inner tear that will stay with me for a long time. Michael Patrick MacDonald has written a moving and eye-opening look at a life that many of us never even knew existed nor stopped to find out about. It should be required reading for all High School students - perhaps even Junior High. I admire him for seeing his world so clearly and wanting to help those still caught in the web of drugs, descrimination, pride, and ignorance. Thank you Mr. MacDonald, and please keep us informed of the evolution of your work and your family. Thank you also to Brian Lamb and CSPAN for introducing me to Mr. MacDonald on Book Notes.
Rating:
Summary: I am recommending this book to everyone!
Review: The story is mesmerizing, the writing is excellent and the emotions are all too real. I could not put this book down once I started it. I feel fortunate to have my eyes opened to the "real" Southie at the age of 39!
Rating:
Summary: All Souls: A Family Story from Southie
Review: This book was unbelievable. I wish the story was not true but I loved reading about this family they made me laugh and cry. I read this book a week ago and I think about it everyday. I hope everyone reads it.
Rating:
Summary: Only Pawns In Their Game
Review: Claude Brown told it from an African American perspective thirty years ago. Now we have it from an Irish American perspective. Poor people, regardless of race, are used, manipulated and pitted against each other to the advantage of those in power. Still, in communities crushed down by poverty, crime, corruption, alcohol and drug abuse, some people will not let humanity be crushed out of them. As Viktor Frankel observed in the concentration camps some people will survive no matter how oppressive the conditions. I am glad Michael MacDonald survived to remind us of that fact again. This is a painful book to read. I found it compelling in a way I don't with Angela's Ashes (which I have my education students read). This is an important book and should not be considered as an Irish genre work any more than Brown's is Black genre. They both speak to the human condition in a way we need to hear more frequently, for our own humanity's sake.
Rating:
Summary: Heartsong for Irish-Americans
Review: South Boston is the spiritual home of all Boston Irish-Americans. Places like South Boston are the spiritual homes of all Irish-Americans. Most Irish-Americans have their roots in poor, urban, Irish ghettoes. All Souls provides a healing experience for all of us with Irish roots. I've always been proud to be Irish but at the same time a little ashamed of the poverty we came from. Michael MacDonald has given that experience a nobility I will cherish and be proud of for the rest of my life. I saw Angela's Ashes last week and felt I had been hit closer to my heart than I have been for a long, long time. This week I read this book and was hit again in exactly the same spot! It beautifully captures the Irish soul: the incredible fatalism going back to the famine and the prior 800 years of oppression; but in the face of that, a pride and an indomitable spirit that never gives up and never loses the ability to laugh. This is a must read for anyone with Irish roots who wants to understand a very deep part of his or her being. If you have Irish roots you will always have a piece of Southie inside you, and a part of you will always belong to Southie.
Rating:
Summary: Amazingly moving
Review: "All Souls" is a deeply moving and troubling book. The story of the MacDonald family will fill you with sadness and anger. This book is an "Angela's Ashes" for the U.S.
Rating:
Summary: Poverty, Not Race
Review: I'm grateful to MacDonald for this book, mostly because he writes well. You really feel you're living with these people, keeping the lights on at night so the cockroaches won't overrun the apartment, keeping watch at the many wakes, and becoming a part of the odd dramas that play out in the street or off the roofs. I mourned for his schizophrenic eldest brother who jumped off a building to his death and for Frankie, the four times Golden Gloves champ who tried died during his first and last robbery. I cheered for the ones who "got out" through school or professional jobs. I'm also grateful for his recasting of the great South Boston busing chaos of the 1970s. Here, the busing mess is seen more as a class struggle than a racial one. The reader should get a sense from the book that the different ethnic neighborhoods in Boston were less communities than fortresses, keeping any stranger out. When Judge Garrety ordered busing, the Southie residents saw it not as a racial clash as one of class, where a rich judge in Wellesley was dictating how the poor would educate their children. This was a side to the struggle the media never illuminated, much as the TV news anchors (with their six-figure incomes) don't realize there's a class war going on in the streets today. There is a villain in this drama, Whitey Bulger, a name my family recognized this past Christmas. He was a drug and organized crime kingpin in Southie who had an odd family constellation. (His brother, once the president of the Massachusetts Senate, is now the president of the University of Massachusetts.) Whitey supplied all the cocaine and its attending crime to Southie. He was also a snitch for the FBI. People still don't know where he's hiding now, and he's a shadowy, menacing figure in the book.
Rating: 
Summary: All Souls - a story of social and personal tragedy
Review: The problem with poverty is that it is tedious to the point of exhaustion, uninspiring and dangerous. And to boot it doesn't build character. This is certainly a well documented message in All Souls. It is also a healing trip backward by the author to try and come to grips with his traumatic past and his future. In the end, however, All Souls focuses on a larger and more difficult problem. Ultimately it's book about an out of control and seriously corrupt police department. (the Boston Police Department). It's about neglectful, expoitative, and deceitful local politicians. And finally, its about the inability of the residents to effectively combat these sources of oppression and allowing their enemies to validate or enforce Southie's self-weakening and self-destructive behaviors.
Rating:
Summary: All Souls is a "Must Read"
Review: This story compares with "Angela's Ashes" in intensity and readability. I did not put it down once I began reading about this very proud yet poor family. While the losses they suffer are great this is not a depressing book. Much is written about the 1970s forced busing riots from the perspective of a young boy who witnesses from his living room window.
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