An "alternately funny and heartbreaking" memoir of leaving—and finding—home, by the author of All Souls: A Family Story from Southie ( Newsweek).In All Souls, Michael Patrick MacDonald told the story of the loss of four of his siblings to the violence, poverty, and gangsterism of Irish South Boston. In Easter Rising, he tells the story of how he got out.Desperate to avoid the "normal" life of Southie, Michael first reinve...

The anti-busing riots of 1974 forever changed Southie, Boston's working class Irish community, branding it as a violent, racist enclave. Michael Patrick MacDonald grew up in Southie's Old Colony housing project. He describes the way this world within a world felt to the troubled yet keenly gifted observer he was even as a child: "[as if] we were protected, as if the whole neighborhood was watching our backs for threats, watching for all the enemies we could never really define."But...

A coming-of-age story about surviving trauma and finding purpose through Boston’s punk rock scene of the 1970s to New York City and beyond, from the bestselling author of All SoulsIn All Souls, Michael Patrick MacDonald chronicled a heartbreaking saga of familial loss amid Irish South Boston's culture of silence. In Easter Rising, he tells the story of how he managed to survive it.Finding refuge in the city's burgeoning undergroun...

Nonfiction storytelling is at its best in this anthology of excerpts from memoirs by thirty authors—some eminent, some less well known—who grew up tough and talented in working-class America. Their stories, selected from literary memoirs published between 1982 and 2014, cover episodes from childhood to young adulthood within a spectrum of life-changing experiences. Although diverse ethnically, racially, geographically, and in sexual orientation, these writers share a youthful precocity and...

A coming-of-age story about surviving trauma and finding purpose through Boston’s punk rock scene of the 1970s to New York City and beyond, from the bestselling author of All SoulsIn All Souls, Michael Patrick MacDonald chronicled a heartbreaking saga of familial loss amid Irish South Boston's culture of silence. In Easter Rising, he tells the story of how he managed to survive it.Finding refuge in the city's burgeoning undergroun...

The anti-busing riots of 1974 forever changed Southie, Boston's working class Irish community, branding it as a violent, racist enclave. Michael Patrick MacDonald grew up in Southie's Old Colony housing project. He describes the way this world within a world felt to the troubled yet keenly gifted observer he was even as a child: "[as if] we were protected, as if the whole neighborhood was watching our backs for threats, watching for all the enemies we could never really define."But...

This fresh account of Massachusetts's infamous Bulger brothers unveils a stunning criminal alliance, and with its dual biography format, goes deeper than the New York Times bestselling Black Mass. For the first time, journalist Howie Carr reveals the real story behind the infamous Bulgers—two brothers from South Boston who grew up to control a state. With political corruption on one side and deadly force on the other, the Bulgers shared a diabolic and destructive alliance...

In the early 1870s, local children begin disappearing from the working-class neighborhoods of Boston. Several return home bloody and bruised after being tortured, while others never come back.With the city on edge, authorities believe the abductions are the handiwork of a psychopath, until they discover that their killer—fourteen-year-old Jesse Pomeroy—is barely older than his victims. The criminal investigation that follows sparks a debate among the world's most revered medical mi...

*Now a major motion picture—Rob Peace—starring Jay Will, Mary J. Blige, and Chiwetel Ejiofor**Named a Best Book of the Year by The New York Times Book Review, Entertainment Weekly, and more* The New York Times bestselling account of a young African-American man who escaped Newark, NJ, to attend Yale, but still faced the dangers of the streets when he returned is, “nuanced and shattering” (People) and “mesmeric” (...

John Lydon is an icon—one of the most recognizable and influential cultural figures of the last forty years. As Johnny Rotten, he was the lead singer of the Sex Pistols, the world's most notorious band. The Pistols shot to fame in the mid-1970s with songs such as "Anarchy in the U.K." and "God Save the Queen." So incendiary was their impact at the time that in their native England, the Houses of Parliament questioned whether they violated the Traitors and Treasons Act, a crime that carries...

**NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • NAMED ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE, USA TODAY, AND CHICAGO TRIBUNE • A masterly work of literary journalism about a senseless murder, a relentless detective, and the great plague of homicide in AmericaNATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FINALIST • NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The New York Times Book Review • The Washington Post • The Boston Globe • The Economist • The Globe...

Here is the shocking true saga of the Irish American mob. In Paddy Whacked, bestselling author and organized crime expert T. J. English brings to life nearly two centuries of Irish American gangsterism, which spawned such unforgettable characters as Mike "King Mike" McDonald, Chicago's subterranean godfather; Big Bill Dwyer, New York's most notorious rumrunner during Prohibition; Mickey Featherstone, troubled Vietnam vet turned Westies gang leader; and James "Whitey" Bulger, the r...