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Twenty-Five Years Among the Poorest Children in America
Crown
September 2012
On Sale: August 28, 2012
354 pages
ISBN: 1400052467
EAN: 9781400052462
Kindle: B007MGPXO8
Hardcover / e-Book
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Non-Fiction
In this powerful and culminating work about a group of
inner-city children he has known for many years, Jonathan
Kozol returns to the scene of his prize-winning books
Rachel and Her Children and Amazing Grace, and
to the children he has vividly portrayed, to share with us
their fascinating journeys and unexpected victories as they
grow into adulthood.
For nearly
fifty years Jonathan has pricked the conscience of his
readers by laying bare the savage inequalities inflicted
upon children for no reason but the accident of being born
to poverty within a wealthy nation. A winner of the National
Book Award, the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award, and countless
other honors, he has persistently crossed the lines of class
and race, first as a teacher, then as the author of tender
and heart-breaking books about the children he has called
“the outcasts of our nation’s ingenuity.” But Jonathan is
not a distant and detached reporter. His own life has been
radically transformed by the children who have trusted and
befriended him.
Never has this
intimate acquaintance with his subjects been more apparent,
or more stirring, than in Fire in the Ashes, as
Jonathan tells the stories of young men and women who have
come of age in one of the most destitute communities of the
United States. Some of them never do recover from the
battering they undergo in their early years, but many more
battle back with fierce and, often, jubilant determination
to overcome the formidable obstacles they face. As we watch
these glorious children grow into the fullness of a healthy
and contributive maturity, they ignite a flame of hope, not
only for themselves, but for our
society.
The urgent issues
that confront our urban schools – a devastating race-gap, a
pathological regime of obsessive testing and drilling
students for exams instead of giving them the rich
curriculum that excites a love of learning – are interwoven
through these stories. Why certain children rise above it
all, graduate from high school and do well in college, while
others are defeated by the time they enter adolescence, lies
at the essence of this
work.
Jonathan Kozol is the author
of Death at an Early Age, Savage Inequalities,
and other books on children and their education. He has been
called “today’s most eloquent spokesman for America’s
disenfranchised.” But he believes young people speak most
eloquently for themselves; and in this book, so full of the
vitality and spontaneity of youth, we hear their testimony.
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