Amazing grace The lives of children and the conscience of a nation

Review by Booklist Review

When Kozol began to write about the lives of poor people in Death at an Early Age (1967), it was possible to believe Americans wanted to do right by the nation's children, even poor children and children of color; this faith now seems naive. In Amazing Grace, families like those whose Manhattan welfare hotels Kozol described in Rachel and Her Children (1988) have been relocated by the city to the South Bronx, which is--with neighboring Harlem and Washington Heights--" one of the largest racially segregated concentrations of poor people in our nation," and Kozol himself seems near despair ("I have never lived through a time as cold as this in the United States" ). Kozol spent a year wandering through Mott Haven and its neighboring communities; visiting churches, schools, hospitals, parks, and homes; talking with parents and kids, social workers, religious leaders, and principals and teachers; struggling to understand how these children and parents cope with destitution and violence and how their fellow citizens can tolerate--even demand--policies that guarantee misery and death for those living a few subway stops north of glitzy midtown Manhattan. Perhaps nothing can halt the juggernaut of resurgent social Darwinism, but, if anything can, it may be Kozol's prophetic vision and the openness and humanity of the remarkable people whose amazing grace he so eloquently describes. (Reviewed Sept. 15, 1995)0517799995Mary Carroll

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

---

Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Kozol (Savage Inequalities) began visiting New York's South Bronx in 1993, focusing on Mott Haven, a poor neighborhood that is two thirds Hispanic, one third black. This disquieting report graphically portrays a world where babies are born to drug-using mothers with AIDS, where children are frequently murdered, jobs are scarce and a large proportion of the men are either in prison or on crack cocaine or heroin. Kozol interviewed ministers, teachers, drug pushers, children who have not yet given up hope. His powerfully understated report takes us inside rat-infested homes that are freezing in winter, overcrowded schools, dysfunctional clinics, soup kitchens. Rejecting what he calls the punitive, blame-the-poor ideology that has swept the nation, Kozol points to systemic discrimination, hopelessness, limited economic opportunities and New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani's cutbacks in social services as causes of this crisis. While his narrative offers no specific solutions, it forcefully drives home his conviction: a civilized nation cannot allow this situation to continue. Author tour. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

---

Review by Library Journal Review

Alicea and Kozol paint a vivid portrait of life in one of America's most impoverished neighborhoods, New York City's South Bronx. While telling similar stories, each narrative has its own unique flavor and characteristics that reveal the crushing nature of poverty in America and recount the lives of those who rise above it. Kozol (Savage Inequalities, LJ 9/15/91) describes a neighborhood ravaged by drugs, violence, hunger, AIDS, and antipathy but also one where children defy all the stereotypes. In the South Bronx, where the median income is $7600 a year and everything breaks down, Kozol reveals that the one thing that has remained resilient is the children. One of the resident children is 15-year-old Alicea, who saw his mother and sister succumb to AIDS, a father incarcerated in prison, and friends entrapped by drugs or violence. Like that of many children, his story is a life of options or despair. The path they pursue is dependent on government leadership. Both books should be required reading for policymakers and those concerned with the plight of the American poor.‘Michael A. Lutes, Univ. of Notre Dame Lib., Ind. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

---

Review by Kirkus Book Review

A wrenching cri de coeur from a section of New York City where drugs, AIDS, cold, hunger, and rats who feed on babies are part of a child's everyday world. Kozol is a tireless witness to the travesty of childhood experienced by so many young Americans. As politicians slash budgets, pronouncing that the poor have only themselves to blame, and academics argue about the rise and fall of the bell curve, he writes about the wretched lives of children whose families are racked by illness, tragedy, violence--and, yes, drugs, alcohol, and teenage pregnancy. What makes Kozol's books (Savage Inequalities, 1991, etc.) so powerful is their simplicity. They are graphic observations of life in urban neighborhoods that are, literally and figuratively, the garbage dumps of the privileged. For this volume he spends time in the Mott Haven section of New York City's South Bronx, a 15-minute subway ride from Manhattan's elite East Side. There the Hispanic and black residents are among the ""poorest of the poor""--median household income is $7,600 a year, or $147 a week to cover rent, food, clothes, transportation, roach powder, cleaning supplies, phone calls, and attendance at funerals. More than one-third of their number are children. The children suffer depression and anxiety; a disproportionate number are asthmatics. These children are taught to crawl on their stomachs away from windows when they hear gunshots. What about the ""breakdown of the family""? Says a minister: ""Everything breaks down in a place like this . . . the pipes . . . the phone . . . the electricity and heat. Why wouldn't the family break down also?"" What is remarkable is that under these circumstances these same children laugh, draw happy pictures, eat ices, and share the pizza slice that is their dinner with someone hungrier. This time, Kozol has no answers; he does pass along some comfort (borrowed from a local church) in the form of the last verse of ""Amazing Grace"": ""Through many dangers, toils, and snares . . . grace will lead me home. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

---

The Number 6 train from Manhattan to the South Bronx makes nine stops in the 18-minute ride between East 59th Street and Brook Avenue. When you enter the train, you are in the seventh richest congressional district in the nation. When you leave, you are in the poorest. The 600,000 people who live here and the 450 000 people who live in Washington Heights and Harlem, which are separated from the South Bronx by a narrow river , make up one of the largest racially segregated concentrations of poor people in our nation. Brook Avenue, which is the tenth stop on the local, lies in the center of Mott Haven, whose 48,000 people are the poorest in the South Bronx. Two thirds are Hispanic, one third black. Thirty-five percent are children. In 1991, the median household income of the area, according to the New York Times , was $7,600. St. Ann's Church, on St. Ann's Avenue, is three blocks from the subway station. The children who come to this small Episcopal church for food and comfort and to play, and the mothers and fathers who come here Or prayer, are said to be the poorest people in New York. " More than 95 percent are poor," the pastor says-"the poorest of the poor, poor by any standard I can think of." At the elementary school that serves the neighborhood across the avenue, only seven of 800 children do not qualify for free school lunches. "Five of those seven," says the principal, "get reduced-price lunches, because they are classified as only 'poor,' not 'destitute.' " In some cities, the public reputation of a ghetto neighborhood bears little connection to the world that you discover when you walk thestreets with children and listen to their words. In Mott Haven, this is not the case. By and large, the words of the children in the streets and schools and houses that surround St. Ann's more than justify the grimness in the words of journalists who have described the area. Crack-cocaine addiction and the intravenous use of heroin, which children I have met here call "the needle drug," are woven into the texture of existence in Mott Haven. Nearly 4,000 heroin injectors, many of whom are HIV-infected, live here. Virtually every child at St. Ann's knows someone, a relative or neighbor, who has died of AIDS, and most children here know many others who are dying now of the disease. One quarter of the women of Mott Haven who are tested in obstetric wards are positive for HIV. Rates of pediatric AIDS, therefore, are high. Depression is common among children in Mott Haven. Many cry a great deal but cannot explain exactly why. Fear and anxiety are common. Many cannot sleep. Asthma is the most common illness among children here. Many have to struggle to take in a good deep breath. Some mothers keep oxygen tanks, which children describe as "breathing machines," next to their children's beds. The houses in which these children live, two thirds of which are owned by the City of New York, are often as squalid as the houses of the poorest children I have visited in rural Mississippi, but there is none of the greenness and the healing sweetness of the Mississippi countryside outside their windows, which are often barred and bolted as protection against thieves. Some of these houses are freezing in the winter. In dangerously cold weather, the city sometimes distributes electric blankets and space heaters to its tenants. In emergency conditions, if space heaters can't be used, because substandard wiring is overloaded, the city's practice, according to Newsday , is to pass out sleeping bags. "You just cover up ... and hope you wake up the next morning," says a father of four children, one of them an infant one month old, as they prepare to climb into their sleeping bags in hats and coats on a December night. In humid summer weather, roaches crawl on virtually every surface of the houses in which many of the children live. Rats emerge from holes in bedroom walls, terrorizing infants in their cribs. In the streets outside, the restlessness and anger that are present in all seasons frequently intensify under the stress of heat. In speaking of rates of homicide in New York City neighborhoods, the Times refers to the streets around St. Ann's as "the deadliest blocks" in "the deadliest precinct" of the city. If there is a deadlier place in the United States, I don't know where it is. In 1991, 84 people, more than half of whom were 21 or younger, were murdered in the precinct. A year later, ten people were shot dead on a street called Beckman Avenue, where many of the children I have come to know reside. On Valentine's Day of 1993, three more children and three adults were shot dead on the living room floor of an apartment six blocks from the run-down park that serves the area. In early July of 1993, shortly before the first time that I visited the neighborhood, three more people were shot in 30 minutes in tree unrelated murders in the South Bronx, one of them only a block from St. Ann's Avenue. A week later, a mother was murdered and her baby wounded by a bullet in the stomach while they were standing on a South Bronx corner. Three weeks after that, a minister and elderly parishioner were shot outside the front door of their church, while another South Bronx resident was discovered in his bathtub with his head cut off. In subsequent days, a man was shot in both his eyes and a ten-year-old was critically wounded in the brain. What is it like for children to grow up here? What do they think the world has done to them? Do they believe that they are being shunned or hidden by society? If so, do they think that they deserve this? What is it that enables some of them to pray? When they pray, what do they say to God? Excerpted from Amazing Grace: The Lives of Children and the Conscience of a Nation by Jonathan Kozol All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

---