OUT OF THE MADNESS: From the Projects to a Life of Hope

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.