AudioLinks101: Ghetto Life 101

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This 2002 NPR piece, Ghetto Life Revisited (8:08), discusses a Showtime docudrama about two young men growing up in the high-rise projects of Chicago's South Side.
Nine years earlier (in 1993), David Isay produced this radio docudrama, Ghetto Life 101 (31:06) about these same two young men, LeAlan Jones, then thirteen, and Lloyd Newman, then fourteen.
The boys taped for ten days, walking listeners through their daily lives: to school, to an overpass to throw rocks at cars, to a bus ride that takes them out of the ghetto, and to friends and family members in the community. The candor in Jones and Newman's diaries brought listeners face to face with a portrait of poverty and danger and their effects on childhood in one of Chicago's worst housing projects. Like Vietnam War veterans in the bodies of young boys, Jones and Newman described the bitter truth about the sounds of machine guns at night and the effects of a thriving drug world on a community.
Jones and Newman returned to radio documentary in October 1994, with Remorse (39:19), in order to report on a horrific death of a five-year-old boy, Eric Morse.

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One ongoing issue with ghetto life is the extent that it represents a distinct and largely unknown world within our world—a place as foreign to us as another country. How strange a place do you find LeAlan’s and Lloyd’s world?
Age also seems to be a key issue here. What do you make of the fact that the storytellers are in their young teens? What were you doing at that age?

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