All Souls: A Family Story from Southie

A book by Michael Patrick MacDonald.

"The anti-busing riots of 1974 forever changed Southie, Boston's workign 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.' 

... MacDonald, eight years old when the riots hit, gives an explosive account of the asphalt warfare. He tells of feeling 'part of it all, part of something bigger than I'd ever imagined, part of something that was on the national news everynight.;"