Michael Patrick MacDonald

I feel like I learned a lot, but this was a hard book to read. Unrelentingly grim memoir.

Powerful and heartfelt - had me in tears a few times. About the only thing I can say about it in the negative column is that it ends just as it's about to get interesting.

All Souls is exhausting and draining and I would recommend it to anyone. MacDonald's writing is hardly poetic, which only adds to the weight of the book's realism. It reads like a brutal and bloody call for social justice in one of the most honest and least political voices imaginable. I feel like this book will haunt me for a while.

MacDonald was a speaker at a UU event I attended. His story was poignant, compelling, and heart-breaking. I bought the book he had written, which provided greater detail, and found it equally compelling. To read about a family in which one-by-one the kids are killed or otherwise die due in large measure to their environment and largely beyond their control is sobering. The book was autographed by the author. Steel yourself before you begin the book, but by all means do read it.