“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...

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...

Nonfiction storytelling is at its best in this anthology of excerpts from memoirs by thirty authors—some eminent, some less well known—who grew up tough and talented in working-class America. Their stories, selected from literary memoirs published between 1982 and 2014, cover episodes from childhood to young adulthood within a spectrum of life-changing experiences. Although diverse ethnically, racially, geographically, and in sexual orientation, these writers share a youthful precocity and...

“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...

In a world first, almost incredibly, Riaan Manser rode a bicycle right around the continent of Africa. It took him two years, two months and fifteen days. He rode 36 500 kilometres through 34 different countries. In Around Africa on my Bicycle, Manser tells the story of this epic journey. It is a story of blood, sweat, toil and tears. It is a story of triumph and occassional disaster. Of nights out under the stars, of searing heat and rain, of endless miles of Africa and of pressing on and...

A look at the emotional side of medicine—the shame, fear, anger, anxiety, empathy, and even love that affect patient carePhysicians are assumed to be objective, rational beings, easily able to detach as they guide patients and families through some of life’s most challenging moments. But doctors’ emotional responses to the life-and-death dramas of everyday practice have a profound impact on medical care. And while much has been written about the minds and methods o...

The New York Times bestseller and the basis for the classic drug-smuggling film: "A well-told tale of adventure, greed, deceit, and revenge." — Houston ChronicleBlow is the unlikely story of George Jung's roller coaster ride from middle-class high school football hero to the heart of Pablo Escobar's Medellin cartel—the largest importer of the United States cocaine supply in the 1980s. J...

The astonishing story of how the British codebreakers of Bletchley Park cracked the Nazi Enigma cyphers, cutting an estimated two years off the Second World War, never ceases to amaze.No one is better placed to tell that story than Michael Smith, whose number one bestseller Station X was one of the earliest accounts. Using recently released secret files, along with personal interviews with many of the codebreakers themselves, Smith now provides the definitive account of everything ...

"Emling offers an intimate look at Curie's relationship with her children . . . [a] fascinating, moving story." — The Boston GlobePublished to widespread acclaim, in Marie Curie and Her Daughters, science writer Shelley Emling shows that far from a shy introvert toiling away in her laboratory, the famed scientist and two-time Nobel prize winner was nothing short of an iconoclast.Emling draws on personal letters released by ...

Annabel Beam is one of three sisters raised in the Texas countryside by loving parents. But what should have been a happy, carefree childhood was blighted when Annabel developed a painful and seemingly incurable digestive disorder. Her parents spared no expense in the search for a cure, but medical experts assured them there was none.On a rare day when Annabel felt well enough to play outside, she was climbing an old hollowed-out tree when a branch snapped and she fell, head first,...