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...

“Whether you grew up in South Boston, Belfast, Brooklyn, or somewhere else entirely, you'll recognize something familiar in his search for identity, purpose, belonging, and home.”—Ken Casey of The Dropkick Murphys, from the forewordIn 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.As the ...

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...

“Whether you grew up in South Boston, Belfast, Brooklyn, or somewhere else entirely, you'll recognize something familiar in his search for identity, purpose, belonging, and home.”—Ken Casey of The Dropkick Murphys, from the forewordIn 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.As the ...

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...

*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” (...

The gripping, true story of a brutal serial killer who unleashed his own reign of terror in Nazi-Occupied Paris.As decapitated heads and dismembered body parts surfaced in the Seine, Commissaire Georges-Victor Massu, head of the Brigade Criminelle, was tasked with tracking down the elusive murderer in a twilight world of Gestapo, gangsters, resistance fighters, pimps, prostitutes, spies, and other shadowy figures of the Parisian underworld. But while trying to solv...

In what is widely hailed as the best of his many novels, Charles Bukowski details the long, lonely years of his own hardscrabble youth in the raw voice of alter ego Henry Chinaski. From a harrowingly cheerless childhood in Germany through acne-riddled high school years and his adolescent discoveries of alcohol, women, and the Los Angeles Public Library's collection of D. H. Lawrence, Ham on Rye offers a crude, brutal, and savagely funny portrait of an outcast's coming-of-age durin...

The author of the bestseller The Disappearing Spoon reveals the secret inner workings of the brain through strange but true stories.Early studies of the human brain used a simple method: wait for misfortune to strike -- strokes, seizures, infectious diseases, horrendous accidents -- and see how victims coped. In many cases their survival was miraculous, if puzzling. Observers were amazed by the transformations that took place when different parts of the br...

The House Girl, the historical fiction debut by Tara Conklin, is an unforgettable story of love, history, and a search for justice, set in modern-day New York and 1852 Virginia.Weaving together the story of an escaped slave in the pre–Civil War South and a determined junior lawyer, The House Girl follows Lina Sparrow as she looks for an appropriate lead plaintiff in a lawsuit seeking compensation for families of slaves. In her research, she learns about Lu Anne Be...

On November 22, 1963, Dr. Charles Crenshaw, an accomplished surgeon, tried to save John F. Kennedy's life—and then days later, the life of the alleged assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald. His gripping, firsthand account contradicts the Warren Commission and years of public misperception, and illuminates a chapter in American history long cloaked in conspiracy.Writing with eye-opening immediacy, Dr. Crenshaw takes listeners into the emergency room to share the critical events at Parkland Ho...

With humor and heart, Over Our Dead Bodies does for the undertaking profession what Mary Roach's Stiff did for cadavers, and, like Caitlin Doughty's Will My Cat Eat My Eyeballs? gives us permission to embrace our morbid curiosity. From the authors of Mortuary Confidential.Not knowing what to do, I sat on the church steps and waited. As the gravity of my failure began to well up in me, I began to cry . . .I HA...