Books: Our America: Life And Death On The Southside Of Chicago
Why I am recommending this book:
Because it takes extraordinary courage to survive the kind of conditions that these kids had to survive.
Because we can learn a great deal from their strength and from their willingness to see the world as it might be.
Click here to purchase this book.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.
Click here to purchase this book.
