Books about Southie from Amazon.com

A best-selling classic in a fresh new paperback edition

A breakaway bestseller since its first printing, All Souls takes us deep into Michael Patrick MacDonald's Southie, the proudly insular neighborhood with the highest concentration of white poverty in America. Rocked by Whitey Bulger's crime schemes and busing riots, MacDonald's Southie is populated by sharply hewn characters like his Ma, a miniskirted, accordion-playing single mother who endures the deaths of four of her eleven children. Nearly suffocated by his grief and his community's code of silence, MacDonald tells his family story here with gritty but moving honesty.

"All Souls is a memoir filled with desperation and despair, but there is also hope in it . . . [MacDonald's] discovery of his vocation in neighborhood activism is a refreshing change from most memoirs, which so often . . . are largely concerned with describing an ascent to celebrityhood."
—Julian Moynahan, New York Review of Books

"Michael Patrick MacDonald takes us on a heartbreaking tour of his South Boston family."
—Frank McCourt, Irish America Magazine.
Price: $3.75 [Notify me when price goes down.]

In its prime, Boston's Back Bay was known around the world for its Gilded Age mansions and impeccable social credentials A century later it was a neighborhood under seige, threatened with high-rise development and institutional takeovers. Today it is again admired, not only as a proud survivor but as an elegant, livable inner city neighborhood, a tribute to its architectural adaptability and to the spirit of the residents who continue to protect it.

In this richly illustrated book, the authors recount the fascinating saga of this man-made piece of real estate, tracing its development from desolate swampland to the seat of High Victorial respectability. This history is illustrated with more than fifty historical maps and photographs, many never published before.

Next is a tour of the modern neighborhood illustrated with color photographs, a street-by-street survey of many of the district's most intriguing places. Finally, the authors step inside some forty Back Bay houses, ranging from snug single-family dwellings to once-opulent mansions now converted to condominiums or adapted to condominiums or adapted for instututional use.

With 300 illustrations, including 245 color photographs.
Price: $14.50 [Notify me when price goes down.]