[close] Michael Patrick MacDonald's best-selling All Souls: A Family Story from Southie told of the loss of the author's four siblings to the violence, poverty, and gangsterism of Boston's Irish-American ghetto. The question "How did you get out?" has haunted MacDonald ever since. He has written this new book in response, giving answers that are searingly honest and morally urgent.

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. [close]