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

by Jerrold Ladd

Overview

A raw and hopeful autobiography of a young African-American who used self-education and sheer force of will to overcome the battery of drugs, violence, and abject povery of his early life in the Dallas projects.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780446564953
Publisher:	Grand Central Publishing
Publication date:	09/26/2009
Sold by:	Hachette Digital, Inc.
Format:	eBook
File size:	444 KB

Table of Contents

	Introduction	ix
1.	Welcome	1
2.	Deadman	13
3.	Cool Brother	29
4.	School Torture	41
5.	Save Me, Lord	55
6.	Do It for Momma	67
7.	Struggle	75
8.	Marriage	85
9.	Forged	93
10.	Mind Wilderness	105
11.	Stay Alive	111
12.	Closed Lore	123
13.	Failures	135
14.	Baby Jacqua	143
15.	The Firm	153
16.	Rebirth	163
17.	Out of the Madness	177
	Epilogue	183
	Afterword	189
	Acknowledgments	193

Editorial Reviews

In his debut book, Ladd, age 23, recounts the frustrating and often depressing tale of growing up in the slums of South Dallas. Raised in a housing project by his drug-dependent mother, he observed a procession of dealers and hapless father figures steal his mother's attention and his family's food. He describes his experiences of busing and attending an all-white school; he details gang shootouts, evictions and becoming the father of a daughter who was born out of wedlock. As a book lover, his bolt-hole was the public library, where he spent entire days reading. Ladd's prose conveys the rawness of his upbringing. While his narrative thread is uneven, he writes in a fresh and animated voice, offering a view into a brutal element of American society. Author tour. (July)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

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.

Library Journal

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