OUR AMERICA

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)