Out of the Madness: From the Projects to a Life of Hope

Follows one African American's struggle through horrific circumstances, clinging to a heroin-addicted mother, attempting to get out of the violent, drug-ridden projects, and ultimately creating a new life

A 23-year-old black man's memoir of his traumatic life in the ghettos of Dallas is undermined by awkward writing and dubious, sometimes offensive, judgments. Son of a heroin-addicted mother who moved from man to man and apartment to apartment, Ladd grew up in a world of hunger, drugs, and violence. Though he suffered the humiliation of being a ``free lunch kid'' in school, he developed a love of reading and sought to better himself. He struggled to find jobs, succumbing at one stage to committing robbery, but finally emerged as a good worker and a dedicated father to his child. Though now a contributor to the Dallas Morning-News, Ladd regularly writes clunkers (``a new guy was impeding upon his unblemished rap fame'') and repeatedly refers to his housing project as a ``Hitler camp.'' Bright, angry, and not very informed, Ladd presents a disturbing mix of generalization and misinformation about race: By age eight, he observes, blacks are already ``real mature about relationships between men and women''; he and his cohorts, he claims, were ``programmed'' by gangster rap; the armed forces, he asserts, provide no opportunities for blacks; after a white man helps him get a job, he proclaims that successful blacks are just Uncle Toms; after reading The Autobiography of Malcolm X, he doesn't gain a more nuanced sense of identity and history, but instead embraces a cartoon Afrocentrism. Voices from ``the other America'' are worth cultivating, but Ladd should have waited to gain perspective and to work on his craft. (Author tour) -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Ladd's gutsy account of how he managed to beat long odds by escaping from the drug-ridden projects of his youth will receive a 75,000-copy first printing.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Expanding on a story he wrote for the Dallas Morning News, the 23-year-old Ladd provides a gritty look at the way things are for children of poverty. For Jerrold and his older brother and sister, their mother's heroin addiction is central: it drove their father out of their lives, makes their mother moody and violent, and destroys her relationships with the many men, both bad and good, who briefly share the family's homes. But dope, Ladd recognizes early, is a symptom, not the disease; it's the only way his mother and too many of his neighbors know to escape the pain and despair of their lives. Slowly, Jerrold explores alternative directions: reading voraciously; dropping in and out of school; stealing food when he's hungry and, in later years, more valuable goods for cash, but also taking on various demanding jobs; finally teaching himself to write for publication. This vivid, eloquent memoir demonstrates (in case we have forgotten) that impersonal abstractions like "the poor" or "the underclass" are composed of individual adults and children struggling to make some sort of sense of their lives. Mary Carroll