cover image Voices from the Future: Our Children Tell Us about Violence in America

Voices from the Future: Our Children Tell Us about Violence in America

Childrens Express. Crown Publishers, $20 (254pp) ISBN 978-0-517-59494-0

A wake-up call to adult America, this jolting set of interviews with homeless teens, young addicts, gang members, troubled students and residents of foster homes and juvenile detention centers suggests that we are creating a generation seething with anger, violence and emotional problems. From Brooklyn to Indianapolis to Los Angeles, we meet youths ignored, abused, or abandoned by parents whose own lives are devastated by alcohol, drugs, mental illness, poverty and the abuse they suffered as children. Many of the interviewees internalize and re-enact the violence perpetrated on them. Their street-smart humor, their cries for love and simple recognition and their amazingly hopeful resilience in the face of overwhelming odds come through in the interviews, which were conducted by teen journalists of Children's Express, a Washington, D.C.-based news service. Goodwillie is an activist for civil rights and economic justice. Photos. (Sept.)