88 - Amazing Grace: The Lives of Children and the Conscience of a Nation

Amazing Grace: The Lives of Children and the Conscience of a Nation
By Jonathan Kozol

New York, Crown, 1995. 286 pp. $23.00.

All of Jonathan Kozol's work has had to do with America's poor and vulnerable children-his effort to teach them, to understand them, to present their lives, their ordeals and burdens, to others, through the articles and book's he has authored. This latest volume takes his readers to the South Bronx, the poorest congressional district in our nation. We meet elementary school boys and girls, adolescents who are obviously down on their luck, even in physical or medical danger, whose circumstances and stories provide, in their well-chronicled sum, a striking, a stunning glimpse of what the world's richest, strongest country nevertheless continues to tolerate.

These are hurt, seriously endangered young people, but Kozol's considerable talents as an interviewer and writer rescue them from the psychological and sociological stereotypes I fear all too many of us are prepared to saddle upon those who live in our ghettoes. Again and again, a particular child reveals his or her idiosyncratic self-worries and fears, yes, but also aspirations' hopes, and no small amount of wryly ironic comment. Put differently, these are youths who know the score, all right, but who have not quite given up on life, no matter how hard-pressed they constantly feel, and no matter, too, their utter realism with respect to what lies ahead for them and the neighborhood they call home. Such an attitude-a stoic skepticism that is occasionally modified by a surge of hope here, a spell of yearning there-earns the book's title: No matter the duress, here are children who often surprise us mightily by their thoughtfulness, their shrewd sense of what is and what will apparently continue to be.

Not that we are spared moments and longer of gloom, of outright despair. Not that we don't get reminded that all of these children are not as eloquently soulful as some of them get to be as they engage with their compassionate, knowing observer, who once again reminds us that it is possible for people of widely different backgrounds to connect in important, edifying, provocative ways. The barriers of race and class and age can tumble where there is a will, and very important, where there is good will.

89 - Amazing Grace: The Lives of Children and the Conscience of a Nation

In that regard, Jonathan Kozol has been for a generation now a dedicated emissary who dares leave the comfortable world to which he was born and in which he was educated for those "other" neighborhoods that so many of us, these days, try to put out of our minds. His "grace," then, is also "amazing"-his tenacious insistence that he himself not forget what is morally at stake for all of us in the South Bronx and places like it across the land, and that the rest of us be told precisely what goes on, what certain young Americans have to accept as their fate. In a better America, of course, books such as this would not be needed, but in today's America, unfortunately, books such as this are all too readily overlooked-a judgment on how it goes for so many of us who take pains to emphasize our religious background, or our educational achievements, and yet manage ever so successfully to ignore our fellow citizens, whose extreme jeopardy this book documents so carefully, forthrightly, sensitively.

Robert Coles

Harvard University
Cambridge, MA