Summary Of All Souls Chapter Summary

One thing that I have been taught in my World History classes is that humanity does not learn from its past errors. One way of reaffirming this statement/belief is with the relation between what happened during the last half of the 20th century in Boston, Massachusetts and the current crisis that we as Venezuelans are facing. Even though everything about both groups of people are different in infinite ways, our everyday problems are alike.

While reading All Souls, an autobiographical novel written by Michael Patrick MacDonald based on his life in the South Boston area during the busing stage of Bostonian history, I first could relate to the author with the corruption his community faced. In the political stance, it is obvious how the corrupt law enforcement negatively affected the people from Southie, specifically his family. One of his brothers, Stevie was arraigned for alleged first-degree murder of his best friend Tommy, even though it was not true. The detectives against Stevie wanted him to look guilty, therefore they made a fake transcript of his call to the police saying ‘I shot Tommy!” on it. After this, Stevie’s lawyer got a hold of

This resemblance is due to how both of these communities need the same things and face exactly the same problems but in different contexts. In South Boston, all of these characteristics that were originally there, were magnified by the busing crisis. In contrasts, in Venezuelan society these characteristics were also magnified, but by the actions of the government. In the first case, the government was trying to desegregate different races and in the latter the government actually tried to create boundaries between the social classes, which led to an extreme dislike between the polar opposite classes. I found very interesting that these are completely different circumstances, but they add up to the same