The Thumbnail Book Reviews
by John Q McDonald --- 20 March 2006
by Michael Patrick MacDonald
This reader is a contemporary of the author of this compelling memoir of growing up in South Boston in the turbulent 1970s. Having grown up on the other side of Boston, in a working-class northern suburb, though in mostly better economic contitions, the book became a fascinating telling, from another point of view, of memorable events in that time and place. But the book, while in danger of having a provincial quality, contains broadly relevant themes of poverty and race in society, and acknowledges complexities in these issues not often recognized in the corridors of American power. The author grew up poor in a section of mostly-Irish South Boston, in a public housing project called Old Colony. His mother was an energetic and generous woman, who played music in bars and flaunted her good looks in the neighborhood. She, eventually, would have eleven children, all of whom would be marked for life by violence, drugs and poverty. And yet, Southie was a vibrant, insular and tightly-knit Irish-American community that the author recalls very fondly, even through repeated stories of tragedy. While the tone the author takes indicates that he doesn't think his own family's tragedies are exceptional amongst the families in the neighborhood, those tragedies do loom large and sad in the story. He lost two brothers to suicide and another to criminal violence. A third, practically his namesake, died in infancy. Another brother was wrongly accused, based on corrupt police testimony, of murder. Other family members experience various violence along the way. It is an epic story. Within the closed world of the projects, there is a code of silence about the extent of the death and destruction around them. And there is denial. When African-Americans and the government and social institutions that support them, attempt to integrate the projects, it is the fear of drugs and violence that foments opposition, despite the fact that the neighborhood is already drowning in drugs and violence. In 1974, Southie became nationally known when school desegregation and forced busing was violently opposed by Southie residents. The author shows us his family's response which is not steeped in racism, but rather in the resentment that liberals in government, press and non-government organizations would use Southie as a social experiment. The resentment, at least initially, is directed not at African-Americans, but at the police and government leaders. At times, though, this assertion sounds like Southerners protesting that the Civil War was all about states' rights. There are larger factors at work here, and the author sometimes dances around these. And yet, he does manage to get the reader to question our conventional approach to race and poverty in this country. In the end, by the mid 1990s, Southie is becoming gentrified, to the author's regret. And, again, he asks relevant questions about the rights of the poor in neighborhoods given over to larger social or economic forces. The book is troubling in almost every sense. The tale is straightforward and compelling. It is a heartfelt and revealing story. Recommended.