You might be able to find a copy of this biographical book if the subject interests you: "All Souls," pub. 1999, by Michael Patrick MacDONALD, about growing up in an Irish neighborhood in the south Boston slums. The threats, poverty, drugs, a shadowy gangster world, were real. MacDonald lost four of his siblings to violence and poverty. We meet Ma, Michael's mini-skirted, accordion-playing, usually single mother who cares for her children, there are eventually ten, though a combination of high spirits and inspired "getting over" the men in her life - Dave "Mac" MacDonald, George Fox, Bob King and Coley Perkins. There are Michael's older siblings, Davey, sweet artist-dreamer; Kevin, child genius of scam; and Frankie, Golden Gloves boxer and neighborhood hero - whose lives are high-wire acts playing out in a world of poverty and pride. "My oldest memories are of my mother crying, I don't know how old I was, but I remember looking up from the floor and seeing her sitting on the old trunk that her father had carried from Ireland when he was 18 in search of some good luck in America. She was only crying a little, and tried to hide it from me when she saw that I'd noticed. I climbed onto her lap and asked her why she was sad. She told me then about her baby who'd died and gone to heaven. She said his name was Patrick Michael, but that it was all going to be okay now because now we had someone watching over us, praying for us every day. She told me that I'd taken Patrick Michael's place, and that she'd switched the name around calling me Michael Patrick. She showed me the light green knit hat that someone had given Patrick. He wore that hat home from the hospital when he was born, and he was baptized in it. It still smelled like a baby and had yellowing food stains on it. It was all we had of Patrick. There was no picture ever taken of the six-week-old baby. I could never really get mad at her the way most kids did at their parents, I could never judge her or blame her for anything in our lives. After I saw her cry for Patrick Michael, I only wanted to protect her." Within a few years, the neighborhood's collapse is echoed by the MacDonald family's tragedies. All but destroyed by grief and by the Southie code that doesn't allow him to feel it, MacDonald gets out. His work as a peace activist - first in the all-Black neighborhoods of nearby Roxbury, then back to the Southie he can't help but love - is the powerfully redemptive close to a story that will leave readers utterly shaken and changed. Michael helped launch Boston's successful gun-buyback program and is the founder of the South Boston Vigil Group. On his return to Southie, Michael wrote, "I was back in Southie, 'the best place in the world,' as Ma used to say before the kids died. That's what he call them now, "the kids." Even when we want to say their names, we sometimes get confused about who's dead and who's alive in my family. After so many deaths, Ma just started to call my four brothers "the kids" when we talked about going to see them at the cemetery. But I don't go anymore. They're not at the cemetery; I never could find them there. When I accepted the fact that I couldn't feel them at the graves, I figured it must be because they were in heaven, or the spirit world, or whatever you want to call it. The only things I kept from the funerals were the mass cards that said," Do not stand at my grave and weep, I am not there, I do not sleep. I am the stars that shine through the night," and so on. I figured that was the best way to look at it. There are seven of us kids still alive, and sometimes I'm not even sure if that's true. I came back to Southie in the summer of 1994, after everyone in my family had either died or moved to the mountains of Colorado. I'd moved to downtown Boston after Ma left in 1990, and was pulled one night to wander through Southie. I walked from Columbia Point Project, where I was born, to the Old Colony Project where I grew up, in the "Lower End," as we called it. ...I walked the streets of my old neighborhood..."the kids" were joined in my mind by so many others I'd last seen in caskets at Jackie O'Brien's Funeral Parlor. They were all here now, all of my neighbors and friends who had died young from violence, drugs, and from all the other deadly things we'd been taught didn't happen in Southie. We thought we were in the best place in the world in this neighborhood, in the all-Irish housing projects where everyone claimed to be Irish even if his name was Spinnoli. We were proud to be from here, as proud as we were to be Irish. Southie was Boston's proud Irish neighborhood. That's what we considered each other in Southie - family. There was always this feeling that we were protected, as if the whole neighborhood was watching our back for threats, watching for all the enemies we could never really define. No "outsiders" could mess with us. So we had no reason to leave, and nothing ever to leave for. When I rode around the Lower End there were the landmarks of my childhood: St. Augustine's grammar school where Ma struggled to keep up with tuition payments so we wouldn't be bused to black neighborhoods; the Boys and Girls Club, where I was on the swim team with my brother Kevin; Darious Court, when I played and watched the busing riots; the liquor store with a giant green shamrock painted on it, where Whitey Bulger ran the Southie drug trade; the sidewalk where my sister had crashed from a project rooftop after a fight over drugs; and St. Augustine's Church, down whose front steps I'd helped carry my brothers' heavy caskets." The book, of course, has its humorous moments.