He describes boarding the subway right next to Blooming-dale’s six stops and twenty minutes later, he is at the Brook Avenue station in the middle of what appears to be a moonscape of burned-out buildings and abandoned, garbage-strewn lots. To Kozol, the very existence of Mott Haven, the poorest neighborhood in New York City, is an unmitigated crime-all the greater because of its proximity to the luxury of Manhattan’s Upper East Side. This work has been promoted and accepted as yet another courageous and personal journey into the lower depths, a deeply felt account of the lives-and sometimes the premature deaths-of children in the Mott Haven section of the South Bronx. With Amazing Grace, Kozol is at it again. Nor did it damage Kozol’s reputation as a witness to injustice. Unfortunately, the revelation that Savage Inequalities was a thinly disguised clip job did not prevent it from being designated a finalist for the prestigious National Book Critics Circle award. But in a review in New York Newsday, the education writer Sara Mosle reported that at least some of Kozol’s descriptions had been lifted from local newspaper stories and then passed off as direct personal observations. In his introduction to that book, Kozol stated that he had spent many days sitting in classrooms in over 30 schools in six different cities.
Kozol has been plumbing the depths of poor inner-city neighborhoods and the children who live there.”īut has he? Take his 1991 bestseller, Savage Inequalities, hailed as a searing indictment of the gross disparities in funding for schools in wealthy and poor communities across the country. “For almost three decades,” reports a recent and admiring profile in the New York Times, “Mr.
Jonathan Kozol is widely celebrated as a teller of cruel truths, a writer who-beginning with Death at an Early Age (1968)-has evoked the pain suffered by millions of children trapped in economically depressed communities and resource-starved ghetto schools. Amazing Grace: The Lives of Children and the Conscience of a Nation
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