Word: macdonald
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Michael Patrick MacDonald grew up in the Old Colony housing projects of South Boston, on 8 Patterson Way. My apartment's exterior, on 490 Pilsudski Way, is identical to his and the other two dozen or so squat brick buildings that make up the Old Colony projects. As I sit on the futon, squinting in the dim light to make out the words of his best-selling memoir All Souls, the familiar street names and locations seem to jump out at me. Outside, I can hear the children playing and adults chatting on stoops, just as they have done...
From the outside, very little has changed in Southie since MacDonald's childhood in the late 1970s. The corner stores, bars on Broadway and Catholic schools he mentions still occupy the same spots, do the same business. But the neighborhood infamous for its racist tendencies, ethnic uniformity and hatred of outsiders that MacDonald so vividly describes is no more. Our most helpful neighbor is a young Puerto Rican father. He lives next door to an elderly Irish-American man. In the concrete courtyard, black and white children giggle together over games of tag. I feel secure walking through the tunnels...
Michael Patrick MacDonald writes about the violence, drugs and poverty but also about the unity, sense of community and tenacity of Southie. He captured its allure in All Souls--the feeling of a small town within a big city, an intact remainder of a bygone era. For better or for worse, Southie is changing. And as a biased observer, I hope that it will shed the few remaining vestiges of its close-mindedness while still retaining its small-town flavor. Only then will Southie be able to leave behind its reputation for intolerance and crime. Only then will Southie...
...Mark MacDonald, who represents a conservative district overwhelmingly opposed to the idea of civil unions, had decided to oppose civil unions until one of his constituents asked him, "What are you going to tell the kids when you go back to school?'' That stopped MacDonald, a social studies teacher for 23 years, cold: "What was I going to tell them? I voted the way I did so it would be easy for me to get reelected...
...Yorker, has written a portrait not only of McCarthy, the critic and novelist, but also of her literary generation. Kiernan's book teems with a splendid cast of characters--starting with McCarthy's Partisan Review crowd of the 1930s and '40s (Philip Rahv, William Phillips, Delmore Schwartz and Dwight Macdonald), then widening to include other figures in McCarthy's busy, contentious life, including Wilson, whom she called "the monster," her unexpected soul mate Hannah Arendt and dozens of gifted walk-ons, such as Robert Lowell and Isaiah Berlin. And of course there is McCarthy's archenemy, Lillian Hellman...