Easter Rising: An Irish American Coming Up from Under

Michael Patrick McDonald grew up in South Boston, a neighborhood rife with drugs, violence, and gangsterism. All thanks to Whitey Bulger and his brother Billy Bulger in the state senate, the two of them destroying the neighborhood and its inhabitants one crime at a time. During the late 70's after losing his brother Davey to suicide Michael ventured into a record store and bought punk rock which began to educate him far better then his neighborhood could. In the 80's with more tragedy coming from another older brother killed in a robbery to meeting his biological father in his casket, divvying up his time between Boston and New York's East Village. Until a trip to Europe left him broke and his grandfather blackmailing him to see Ireland, something he had little to no desire to do. But this was the changing point for him, making him see his ancestry in a new light, to see that their inferiority was by English standards, and in discovering his roots it relieved him of his anxiety. Easter Rising will leave you loving not just him, but his family most of all.

If you've read "ALL SOULS" you need to read this book too. Also, if you ever have a chance to attend a reading by Michael, GO!!! This description was was done by the publisher... MacDonald's first book told of the loss of the author's four siblings to the violence, poverty, and gangsterism of Boston's Irish-American ghetto. The question "How did you get out?" has haunted him ever since. This narrative of reinvention begins with the young MacDonald's first forays outside the soul-crushing walls of Southie's Old Colony housing project. In greater Boston and eventually New York's East Village, he becomes part of the club scene, providing a 1980s social history and a powerful glimpse of what punk music was for him: a lifesaving form of subversion and self-education. Yet family tragedies eventually draw him home again, to a devastating breakdown induced by trauma and guilt. He meets his father for the first time, as a corpse. Finally, two trips to Ireland, the first as an alienated young man, the second with his extraordinary "Ma," are healing journeys unlike any other in Irish-American literature.

This book is in my top 5 reads for 2006. I connected to it on a ton of levels - the way Michael Patrick MacDonald descibes falling in love with Punk Rock, his outsider tendecies, and his experiences in Ireland finding his roots. For anyone from Boston, anyone into Punk Rock, anyone who was "the weird kid" growing up, and any Irish American's out there, THIS IS THE PAGE TURNER FOR YOU!!!!!!!

Having grown up in Boston in the same music scene as Michael Patrick MacDonald and being of Irish heritage, I expected to identify with much of his book and i did. What I didn't expect to do was to recognize something amazing in my own mother that I had never really given her credit for: Toward the end of the book, while MacDonald is in Ireland with Ma (and is often embarrassed by what he perceives as her inappropriateness), she encounters a stranger whose son has died. Because her own losses have been so staggering (and because she is not embarrassed to try) she is able to console him. With a new understanding and appreciation of her, MacDonald writes: "You never know when you'll need to give whatever you've got to give." That's an amazing thing to do really, to give whatever you have to give. My friends from diverse ethnicities and geographies who have read "Easter Rising" have gotten a similar sense of compassion for the places and people that spawned them (and that they previously had wished to distance themselves from). Although it is definitely one man's difficult and inspiring journey, "Easter Rising"'s universal theme will speak to anyone who's ever felt like an outsider or refused to swallow without question what was fed to them. It is a great and brave and honest book.

I am always a little nervous to read a second book by an author whose first book I adored, but I shouldn't have been afraid to read the second book by the incredibly talented writer Michael Patrick MacDonald. He more than lives up to my high expectations with his lyrical, moving, funny EASTER RISING. This is a far more personal book than ALL SOULS, his first book, describing in vivid detail the brilliantly creative methods Mr. MacDonald used to cope, and ultimately survive, a series of unimaginable family tragedies. His life and his books are a testament to the human power of resiliency and capacity for hope. I have read that Mr. MacDonald has many other stories to tell and I, for one, cannot wait to read them. I highly recommend this book to anyone who loves memoirs, Boston, American (and Irish) history and plain old fashioned great writing.

In the past decade or so, the memoir genre has become a loathsome vehicle for self-exploitation, tawdry exhibitionism, and, worse, as an operator's manual for how to live one's life based on the feeble lessons learned by the author. Most memoirs are written to titillate, to access experiences that readers relate to much in the way a passerby witnesses a fatal car crash-- a morbid fascination with the scenario and relief that the mangled victim is not oneself. In this, the memoir connects fundamentally to larger social attitudes in the West: a yearning to visit suffering, to insulate its effects with subjective distance, and carry on while the world enacts crisis after crisis-- all the while enjoying reading about it, viewing it, and not living it. There is a sideshow quality to most memoirs in their sensationalism and masochistic excavation of the personal past. No wonder, considering most memoirists even regard themselves as freaks of nature and their life experience to be an aberration. So one gets the paradox of writing that is meant to garner sympathy while also showing off its own "genuine" distinctiveness. Were it not for Michael Patrick MacDonald's marvelous EASTER RISING, I'd be inclined to call for a ten year moratorium on the memoir(especially to make up for the last decade of banal, badly written recollections). MacDonald neither sensationalizes nor trivializes the people he writes about (particularly himself) or his sociocultural context. Instead, he draws on memory to reconstruct several decades of his South Boston community and its legacy in his own life. Whereas ALL SOULS cast the author as an expert observer of his beleagured neighborhood, EASTER RISING illuminates his individual engagement with his fellow working-class Irish-Americans of Southie. This account is not a sequel per se, but a companion piece, and should be read in tandem with that earlier work. The critical eye and narrative technique are differently formatted and the funneling of history in each--the former expansive, the latter centrifugal-- is molded to advance contrasting levels of perception. What is common to each book is MacDonald's voice-- tender, never brazen, always questioning, never with generalizations. In the course of discussing the multiple tragedies of his own family and the neighborhood at large, highlighting his many tactics to find an identity alternately to escape home and reunite with it, MacDonald writes without melodrama. In addition to scrupulous attention to details he also plays dynamically with the broader implications of his life and findings in terms of race, class, culture, economics, and identity politics, personal and more widely social. This book should not be pigeonholed as Irish (American) lit, a mere coming of age story, or a punk rock memoir. All of these aspects are wonderfully alive in EASTER RISING but the narrative rises above any of the conditions it enumerates. Ultimately, it is an extraordinary saga of coming to term