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...

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...

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...

*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” (...

**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...

Kenneth C. Davis presents a collection of extraordinary stories, each detailing an overlooked episode that shaped the nation’s destiny and character. Davis’s dramatic narratives set the record straight, busting myths and bringing to light little-known but fascinating facts from a time when the nation’s fate hung in the balance.Spanning a period from the Spanish arrival in America to George Washington’s inauguration in 1789, America’s Hidden History explores these episodes,...

American-born Paul Theroux had lived in England for 11 years when he realized he'd explored dozens of exotic locations without discovering anything about his adopted home. So, with a knapsack on his back, he set out to explore by walking and by short train trips. The result is a witty, observant and often acerbic look at an ever eccentric assortments of Brits in all shapes and sizes.

FromBetty Smith, author of the beloved American classic A Tree Grows inBrooklyn, comes an unsentimental yet radiant and uplifting taleof young love and marriage.In 1927, in Brooklyn, New York, Carl Brown and Annie McGairymeet and fall in love. Though only eighteen, Annie travels alone halfway acrossthe country to the Midwestern university where Carl is study...