All Souls

Before Michael Patrick MacDonald even knew the dangers of his own neighborhood, he was a living testament to them: He was given the names of his brother, Patrick Michael, who died of pneumonia when he was just a few weeks old because he was turned away at the hospital. Michael went on to lose 3 more brothers, and after a fourth was tried for his best friend's murder on incomplete and outright false evidence, MacDonald stopped running away from the neighborhood and decided to stay and fight for it.

Despite its vivid depictions of violence, MacDonald's memoir ALL SOULS is really the story of the decline and fall of South Boston. When Michael's mother Helen moved into the Southie projects with her 9 children, she had no illusions about the roach-infested, overheated and overcrowded apartment she was getting, paid for (like most of them) by welfare benefits. But Southie was known as a place where people looked out for each other -- until Boston busing efforts created violent opposition and a new strain of racism directed at nearby neighborhoods like Roxbury.

Too young to understand the epithets thrown around, Michael thought the protests were exciting; as an adult, though, he can see the irreparable damage they did both to the kids who dropped out rather than be bused and the neighborhood's reputation in the city. (He doesn't defend the racism that drove these protests, though.) After the attacks on other neighborhoods, drugs took over thanks to Whitey Bulger, a local gang leader who virtually ruled the neighborhood with his network of thugs, local ne'er-do-wells and corrupt cops.

Helen tried to raise her kids to "get out," but they fell prey to the local siren calls: Frankie escaped jail time by joining the Marines and then making a living as a boxer, only to be lured in by cocaine; Kevin started dealing before he turned 13 but couldn't give it up even after his daughter was born, and Kathy went from a disco lover doing a little angel dust into a coma. The author himself spent his teen years alternately hiding in the downtown punk scene and trying to protect his two little brothers from stray bullets and crazed addicts.

It's rare to read a memoir like this in which a clear villain is singled out, and compared to THE CORNER MacDonald's explanation is pretty simplistic: Whitey sold out the neighborhood for profit, taking advantage of its unrest, and abandoned it in shambles when it suited him.* At the same time, he doesn't zero in on the drugs themselves, only their effects on families like his. Sometimes it seems as though the power to "get out" is so close, but the urge for self-destruction -- or destruction at the hands of your neighbors -- is closer. The death of Michael's brother Davey is extremely acute even though it has nothing to do with Whitey. The question you're left asking is, why didn't anyone try to save Southie?

*Whitey, a partial inspiration for the Showtime program "Brotherhood," is currently on the lam after escaping in 1994 when he heard the FBI would be making arrests around Christmas. Have you seen him?