Word: macdonald
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...were charmed by Frank McCourt's Angela's Ashes but wished at times that the author would have got out of the way of his own beguiling style, try All Souls: A Family Story from Southie (Beacon Press; 288 pages; $24), Michael Patrick MacDonald's guileless and powerful memoir of precarious life and early death in Boston's Irish ghetto...
...MacDonald, 33, grew up and still lives in South Boston, a legendary ethnic enclave that contains one of the country's highest concentrations of white poverty. The distinction is not appreciated by Southie residents, who bristle at being lumped with the black and Hispanic underclass...
...MacDonald's jolting account illustrates, all share the same problems and are familiar with social workers, fatherless households and handouts of surplus cheese. "The only difference," writes the author, "was that in the black and Latino neighborhoods people were saying the words: poverty, drugs, guns, crime, race, class, corruption...
...MacDonald gives new life to this old American story of poor-white pride and prejudice. He also has a knack for quickly grabbing and holding a reader's attention. How's this for an opening line? "I was back in Southie, 'the best place in the world,' as Ma used to say before the kids died...
...Helen Murphy-MacDonald-King, a pub singer and feisty accordionist who gave birth to 11 children fathered by various husbands and boyfriends. In her signature miniskirts, fishnet stockings and spiked heels, Ma is an unmistakable Southie presence...