"Easter Rising is brave heartbreaking piece of truth!" -- Patti Smith
ALL NEW "EASTER RISING" PAPERBACK IN STORES NOW
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Easter Rising Review in Andersonstown News, Belfast
Globe Op-Ed: Remembering Rosemary Nelson, An Irish Champion of Human Rights
Garret O'Connor's Essay on the impact of colonization on later generations. Post Colonial Stress. A favorite essay.
THE WASHINGTON POST:
"MacDonald is a fine writer, with a terrific ear for dialogue and a gift for creating compelling scenes. An instructive, lively tale, told in a voice that's well worth hearing!"
San Francisco Chronicle:
"At pivotal moments, MacDonald's prose--muscular and insistently alive--quivers like a fist about to take a swing. Absorption in the events of one's adolescence is rare in contemporary memoirs (which seem to favor clear-eyed, 'adult' recollections), and refreshing."
A BOOKSENSE TOP 20 PICK
My Boston Globe Op Ed Piece re: “The Departed”
NewsweekReview
BostonPhoenixArticle
”Post Punk” by David Mehegan, Boston Globe Feature
Globe Article Re: American Hardcore, The Film
FROM IRISH AMERICA MAGAZINE:
Me and Studs Terkel in Chicago Sunday Oct 15th
FROM THE IMPROPER BOSTONIAN MAGAZINE:
Poster a student made for recent Northeastern University appearance:
"Heartwrenching. [Yet] conversely, there’s a strong vein of humour here too . up there with the very best comic writing of Seamus Deane and Patrick McCabe . Forty years ago, Pete Hamill, child of Irish ex-pats, penned A Drinking Life, probably the greatest Irish-American memoir of the last century. We’re only seven years into the new age, but with this masterpiece Michael Patrick MacDonald has set an audacious benchmark in Irish-American literature for others to reach."
-- Andersonstown News, Belfast, Ireland
IN HIS best-selling ALL SOULS: A Family Story from Southie, Michael Patrick MacDonald told the powerful story of a decimated community and family, as he chronicled the loss of four siblings to the violence, poverty, and gangsterism of Bostons Irish-American ghetto. In EASTER RISING: An Irish American Coming Up from Under, his much-awaited new memoir, MacDonald finally tells his own story, answering the question How did you get out?
THE BOOK begins with young Michaels first forays outside the soul-crushing walls of Southies Old Colony housing project. Just over the Broadway Bridge in downtown Boston, he becomes part of the music scene. The underground world makes him feel less alone, somehow connected to a larger chaos. "A lot the songs seemed to be about destroying. Some of them just said that everything was screwed up. It felt good that someone was taking notice. It made me feel normal." He eventually winds up in New Yorks East Village drawn by bands like the Bad Brains, at the height of that neighborhoods hora mirabilis when art and music merged at all-night post-punk dance clubs like Danceteria and The Mudd Club.
AND THE clubs offered refuge. They were places where Michael didnt have to be reminded of where he came from and who he really was. While adults like MacDonald's grandfather viewed his participation in the club scene (or the cult of the punk rocks, as the elder MacDonald referred to it) as risky, it was, in fact, a creative and critical way for his grandson to survive. Punk music for Michael was dark, liberating, and lifesaving.
THE DEATH of his brother Frankie while involved in a bank heist eventually draws MacDonald home again, where he suffers an isolated breakdown, marked by heartbreaking scenes of hypochondria, post-traumatic numbing, and (unheard of for a boy from Southie) therapy. In a harrowing and redemptive act of self-discovery, Michael meets his father for the first time, as a corpse laid out at his wake. But his attempt to find something familiar here, and to make a connection with a part of himself that might be beyond Old Colony project, fails. After his experience with the "stranger in a casket," we see Michael start to look closer to home for a sense of self, appreciating for the first time the family that surrounds him.
FINALLY, real change comes when MacDonald travels to Ireland. His two trips there, the first as an alienated young man who has learned to hate shamrocks and leprechauns with a passion, and the second one with his extraordinary Ma, are journeys unlike any other in Irish-American literature. Michael realizes how the ghosts of Irish history, a history ridden with class conflict, oppression, and shame, have haunted Southie and his family to this day. These trips truly transform how MacDonald sees everything in his world -- "It was Ireland that would make everything look different from now on" -- and how he sees Ma too (and her foot-stomping accordion reels). It is among Ireland's landscape that she and her unconventional ways of survival and healing finally make sense to him.
EASTER RISING is the story of Michael Patrick MacDonalds personal path to reconciling himself with where he came from, reclaiming his heritage and learning to use it as a source of inspiration and pride rather than disgrace. It is also the funny, honest, and heart-rending story of both loving and hating the place you call home, which will resonate with any reader from anywhere.
Publisher's Weekly (starred review). "In All Souls, MacDonald told the
heartbreaking story of the tragic deaths of four of his siblings and
his family's suffering amidst a culture of silence in Southie,
Boston's tough Irish ghetto. He also introduced the enduring character
of his accordian-playing, fist-fighting "Ma," who raised her massive
family on her own. MacDonald's second memoir continues the saga with
the author turning his gaze upon himself in hope of explaining how he
escaped where his brethren succumbed. It quickly becomes apparent that
his survival has much to do with his perpetual status as the exile.
He's the "quiet one" in his big Irish-Catholic family, the poor kid at
Boston Latin High School. When his friends branch into drugs and
alcohol, MacDonald remains sober, seeking refuge and a renewed sense
of self in Boston's burgeoning early '80s punk rock scene, where he
encounters such seminal figures as the Clash and Johnny Rotten. As the
odd man out looking for a place to fit in, MacDonald journeys further
and further away from Southiefirst to downtown Boston, then to New
York's Lower East Sideand the dangerous neighborhood rites that
spelled doom for his family members. The book takes on a different
tone as MacDonald heads to Europe after going to the Southie funeral
of his father, a man he never knew. On different occasionsonce with
Mahe finds his way to Ireland, his ancestral homeland, "to understand
more about Southie, and Irish America in general." Even though
MacDonald is far from the first Irish-American to discover the auld
sod, he continues to courageously break Southie's silence in this tale
of a journey that is as inspiring as it is haunting." (Sept. release)
Booklist:
"MacDonald deftly captures the thrilling and surprising initial relevance of the underground culture, shrugging off the more juvenile aspects that would soon pervade its aesthetic. After four of his siblings suffered horrific deaths, though, MacDonald eased away from the increasingly escapist punk lifestyle and in a revelatory trip to Ireland learned to embrace his heritage and connect with his community, rather than flee from it.
Powerful."
