By Michael Patrick MacDonald
Told from the perspective of one of her eleven children, this is the moving true story of a single mom, Helen MacDonald, raising her children (from several different fathers) in a housing project in South Boston. Michael comes of age in the 1970s as busing and racial riots wreak even more havoc in a neighborhood already rocked by poverty and the crime wave of Whitey Bulger. Several of Michael's siblings die through violence or drug-related activities. Amazingly, several of the kids actually attend college and make it out, despite the violence and lack of good parenting. In one funny episode, Michael and his cousins (from a more middle-class neighborhood) go shopping. The cousins have a small allowance that they must spend carefully, but Michael has money to burn, as his mother gives him and his siblings from the bounty of her welfare checks. This is a very good, though tragic, account of survival from the perspective of one of the younger sons who thought Southie was the greatest place in the world. [Of course, it is now a very desirable neighborhood. Times change.]
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