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His first book, All Souls won the American Book Award. He is also the recipient of a New England Literary Lights Award, and the Myers Center Outstanding Book Award administered by the Myers Center for the Study of Bigotry and Human Rights in North America. His second book, the highly acclaimed memoir Easter Rising, was published in 2006. He has written guest columns for the Boston Globe and is currently writing the screenplay of All Souls for director Ron Shelton.

Michael has been awarded an Anne Cox Chambers Fellowship at the MacDowell Colony, a Bellagio Center Fellowship through the Rockefeller Foundation, and residencies at Blue Mountain Center and Djerassi Artist Residency Program.

He currently lives in Brooklyn, New York, and devotes all of his time to writing and public speaking on topics ranging from “Race and Class in America” to “Trauma, Healing, and Social Change.”

]]> male Boston 1966/03/09 654326 105687 034544177X 9780345441775 241 http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1171558335m/105687.jpg http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1171558335s/105687.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/105687.All_Souls_A_Family_Story_from_Southie 4.07 1688 Michael Patrick MacDonald grew up in "the best place in the world"-- the Old Colony projects of South Boston-- where 85% of the residents collect welfare in an area with the highest concentration of impoverished whites in the U.S. In All Souls, MacDonald takes us deep into the secret heart of Southie. With radiant insight, he opens up a contradictory world, where residents are besieged by gangs and crime but refuse to admit any problems, remaining fiercely loyal to their community. MacDonald also introduces us to the unforgettable people who inhabit this proud neighborhood. We meet his mother, Ma MacDonald, an accordion-playing, spiked-heel-wearing, indomitable mother to all; Whitey Bulger, the lord of Southie, gangster and father figure, protector and punisher; and Michael's beloved siblings, nearly half of whom were lost forever to drugs, murder, or suicide. By turns explosive and touching, All Souls ultimately shares a powerful message of hope, renewal, and redemption.
]]> 51918 4.03 2037 303 1999 90375 0618470255 9780618470259 40 http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1171206279m/90375.jpg http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1171206279s/90375.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/90375.Easter_Rising_An_Irish_American_Coming_Up_from_Under 3.67 218
This utterly unconventional narrative of reinvention begins with the young MacDonald's first forays outside the soul-crushing walls of Southie's Old Colony housing project. In greater Boston and eventually New York's East Village, he becomes part of the club scene swirling around Mission of Burma, the Clash, Johnny Rotten, and the Beastie Boys. MacDonald provides one-of-a-kind 1980s social history and a powerful glimpse of what punk music was for him: a lifesaving form of subversion and self-education. And yet family tragedies eventually draw him home again, to a devastating breakdown induced by trauma and guilt. In a harrowing and redemptive act of self-discovery, MacDonald meets his father for the first time, as a corpse laid out at his wake. Finally, two trips to Ireland, the first as an alienated young man who has learned to hate shamrocks with a passion, the second with his extraordinary "Ma," are healing journeys unlike any other in Irish-American literature.]]> 51918 4.03 2037 303 2006