Our America: Life and Death on the South Side of Chicago

Amazon.com
This heartbreaking and inspiring book goes a long way toward fulfilling the wish one of its authors, LeAlan Jones, makes in his epigraph: "You must learn our America as we must learn your America, so that, maybe, someday, we can become one." Based on hours and hours of taped interviews that Jones and Lloyd Newman, two high school students, conducted for two National Public Radio documentaries they prepared in 1993 and 1995, Our America is a no-holds-barred look at the devastatingly poor Chicago neighborhood in which they live. It's a world where elementary school students learn about sex and drugs before they learn how to read, and where many boys do not expect to live to be 20. You finish the book marveling not that so many of those who people it are trapped, but wondering that anyone survives at all.


From Library Journal
When they were 13, Jones and Newman gained notoriety by telling personal stories of life in the poor, violent, and desolate world of Chicago's Ida B. Wells Homes in the award-winning National Public Radio (NPR) documentaries "Ghetto Life 101" and "Remorse: The 14 Stories of Eric Morse." Drawing from more than 100 hours of tapes unused in the original broadcasts, the now 17-year-old authors, with assistance from NPR producer Isay, have created a frank and provocative view of America's minorities from the inside out and bottom up. Scrutinizing life in their poor South Side neighborhood through the experiences of friends, families, and teachers, the authors reveal how disenfranchised from mainstream America the ghetto has become. Jones poignantly states in the opening, "We live in a second America where the laws of the land don't apply and the laws of the street do." A powerful, rousing message for all concerned readers.?Michael A. Lutes, Univ. of Notre Dame Lib., Ind.Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Kirkus Reviews
Stark testimony from two black teenage boys who live in, and report from, the nation's worst urban nightmare. Isay, a leading broadcast journalist, gave voices to America's most socially challenged youth by giving tape recorders to budding journalists in Chicago's notorious South Side housing projects. With Isay's guidance, Jones and Newman produced award-winning documentaries on NPR that were aired as ``Ghetto Life 101'' and ``Remorse: The 14 Stories of Eric Morse.'' The latter production, which dominates this book of transcripts from the broadcast tapes, probes an infamous incident in which two boys, 10 and 11 years old, dropped five-year-old Eric Morse to his death from the top of their public-housing high-rise. Our amateur but persistent reporters record significant facts and opinions from the relatives of America's youngest convicted murderers (each family blames the other's son for instigating the crime). The larger crime here is massive unemployment, which fosters despair and its familiar retinue of substance abuse, teen pregnancy, and gang violence. Gunfire is so prevalent that the youngsters discuss ducking away from daily fusillades of bullets as though they were dodging a summer thunderstorm. Says Jones, ``In Vietnam, them people came back crazy. I live in Vietnam, so what you think I'm gonna be?'' The book's many photographs by John Brooks, another young survivor of the projects, powerfully capture these shell-shocked faces and landscapes. By book's end, college-bound Jones has outpaced his struggling friend Newman, demonstrating perhaps how an absent father can be better than an openly self-destructive one. Readers can be both cheered and dismayed by the fact that only Jones's extraordinary luck and talent have bumped him off the penitentiary/cemetery track. This rough yet eloquent report from the edge of humanity forcefully reminds us that a new generation is even now struggling to survive on our urban battlefields, and to escape. (60 Minutes feature) -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.


Review
Judith Newman The New York Times Book Review Our America is meant to stir the mind and break the heart, and it does just that.

Louise Kiernan Chicago Tribune Heart-cracking power....Our America stands out because its voices spill out virtually unrestrained -- raw, ugly and eloquent.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Every once in a while, voices emerge from a part of the world that we have forgotten or chosen to ignore. Sometimes their words ignite our conscience and rekindle our sense of justice. "Our America", the work of two young men living in one of the most notorious public housing projects in America, does just that. LeAlan Jones and Lloyd Newman have made it their mission to be loud voices out of a dark place, through two nationally acclaimed radio documentaries and now through this book. Informed by stunning photographs taken by a talented young photographer from the projects, "Our America" opens up the world of these two amazing young men, and tells the tragic story of the death of another, Eric Morse, a five year old who was dropped to his death from the fourteenth floor of a building in their project by two other little boys. The book is sometimes funny, often painful, but always full of the promise of "Our America" - that one day, the talent, the gift, the vision, of our children who are being raised in circumstances that should make us all weep will he heard and praised and understood. "Our America" is a step toward that goal.

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly

This book consists mainly of transcripts from two National Public Radio documentaries, "Ghetto Life 101" (1993) and "Remorse: The 14 Stories of Eric Morse" (1996), with interviews conducted by teenage Chicago buddies Jones and Newman, both 13 in 1993. One understands here why the documentaries had such impact; the interviews provide an authentic sense of life in Chicago's notorious housing projects. Jones's teenage sister, for example, calmly notes that more than 25 of her friends have been killed on the streets. Jones, who provides the dominant voice in the book, speaks with colloquial wisdom ("Cause if you play childish games in the ghetto, you're gonna find a childish bullet in your childish brain") and reminds us that "Ghetto kids are not a different breed, we're human." The other documentary explores the death of five-year-old Eric Morse, thrown out of a window by tormentors just a few years older than he. "Those boys didn't have too much reason to value life," Jones observes. However, with the unsparing yet empathetic photos contributed by Brooks, this project was aimed at the eye, and other studies tell us more about the 'hood. Indeed, this book leaves an enormous question hanging: what helped Jones, raised by grandparents, his father absent, his mother mentally ill, his relatives in jail develop his talents, while others succumb to ghetto depredations? Newman, less of a presence in the book, on his part exhibits remarkable aplomb as he pledges to stay off the streets and take care of his family. Isay is a radio documentary producer.

Library Journal

When they were 13, Jones and Newman gained notoriety by telling personal stories of life in the poor, violent, and desolate world of Chicago's Ida B. Wells Homes in the award-winning National Public Radio (NPR) documentaries "Ghetto Life 101" and "Remorse: The 14 Stories of Eric Morse." Drawing from more than 100 hours of tapes unused in the original broadcasts, the now 17-year-old authors, with assistance from NPR producer Isay, have created a frank and provocative view of America's minorities from the inside out and bottom up. Scrutinizing life in their poor South Side neighborhood through the experiences of friends, families, and teachers, the authors reveal how disenfranchised from mainstream America the ghetto has become. Jones poignantly states in the opening, "We live in a second America where the laws of the land don't apply and the laws of the street do." A powerful, rousing message for all concerned readers. Michael A. Lutes, Univ. of Notre Dame Lib., Ind.

Kirkus Reviews

Stark testimony from two black teenage boys who live in, and report from, the nation's worst urban nightmare.

Isay, a leading broadcast journalist, gave voices to America's most socially challenged youth by giving tape recorders to budding journalists in Chicago's notorious South Side housing projects. With Isay's guidance, Jones and Newman produced award-winning documentaries on NPR that were aired as "Ghetto Life 101" and "Remorse: The 14 Stories of Eric Morse." The latter production, which dominates this book of transcripts from the broadcast tapes, probes an infamous incident in which two boys, 10 and 11 years old, dropped five-year-old Eric Morse to his death from the top of their public-housing high-rise. Our amateur but persistent reporters record significant facts and opinions from the relatives of America's youngest convicted murderers (each family blames the other's son for instigating the crime). The larger crime here is massive unemployment, which fosters despair and its familiar retinue of substance abuse, teen pregnancy, and gang violence. Gunfire is so prevalent that the youngsters discuss ducking away from daily fusillades of bullets as though they were dodging a summer thunderstorm. Says Jones, "In Vietnam, them people came back crazy. I live in Vietnam, so what you think I'm gonna be?" The book's many photographs by John Brooks, another young survivor of the projects, powerfully capture these shell-shocked faces and landscapes. By book's end, college-bound Jones has outpaced his struggling friend Newman, demonstrating perhaps how an absent father can be better than an openly self-destructive one. Readers can be both cheered and dismayed by the fact that only Jones's extraordinary luck and talent have bumped him off the penitentiary/cemetery track.

This rough yet eloquent report from the edge of humanity forcefully reminds us that a new generation is even now struggling to survive on our urban battlefields, and to escape.