{"id":941,"date":"2012-09-26T12:45:13","date_gmt":"2012-09-26T17:45:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/johnstrawn.com\/?p=941"},"modified":"2012-09-26T12:45:13","modified_gmt":"2012-09-26T17:45:13","slug":"fire-in-the-ashes-by-jonathan-kozol-a-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/theaposition.com\/johnstrawn\/reviews\/941\/fire-in-the-ashes-by-jonathan-kozol-a-review","title":{"rendered":"Fire in the Ashes by Jonathan Kozol: A Review"},"content":{"rendered":"

Jonathan Kozol, Fire in the Ashes.\u00a0 Twenty-five Years among the Poorest Children in America<\/em>. Crown Publishers, August 2012, 368 pages, $27.00.<\/p>\n

Jonathan Kozol\u2019s first book, Death at an Early Age<\/em>, echoed the engaged intensity of the muckraking journalism of the early 20th century.\u00a0 Published in 1967, it recounted Kozol\u2019s abbreviated tenure teaching in the Boston public schools.\u00a0\u00a0 Fired for introducing students to an \u201cunauthorized\u201d poem by Langston Hughes, Kozol retaliated with a searing indictment of the racism and incompetence he had witnessed in the classroom.\u00a0\u00a0 Kozol\u2019s compassion and empathy for his students animated every page, expressed in\u00a0 counterpoint to the contempt he felt for most of his colleagues, who were white, unrepentantly if sometimes unconsciously racist, and indifferent to the aspirations of their pupils.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Jonathan Kozol's First Book<\/p><\/div>\n

Reflecting the hopes for reform animating the politics of the 60s, Death at an Early Age<\/em> was a huge commercial success.\u00a0\u00a0 But did it have the effect Kozol was surely hoping for?\u00a0\u00a0 Judging by Kozol\u2019s latest book, Fire in the Ashes<\/em>, his thirteenth report from the social\u00a0margins, not only do poor people continue to face almost overwhelming obstacles to improving their lot in life, in many respects their condition is worse than it was fifty years ago.\u00a0\u00a0 At exactly the moment Kozol\u2019s latest jeremiad reached bookstores, the NY Times<\/em> reported that the \u201chomeless population in New York City has jumped sharply over the last year, causing a record number of people to enter the shelter system.\u201d<\/p>\n

Fire in the Ashes<\/em> chronicles the lives of people whose childhoods were spent largely in the custody of New York\u2019s so-called \u201cshelter system,\u201d treated more like convicts than people down on their luck.\u00a0 Kozol first visits the Martinique Hotel in 1985, astonished to discover \u201csickness, squalor, and immiseration\u201d on a scale he\u2019d never seen before.\u00a0\u00a0 The Martinique \u201cwas not merely a despairing place, diseased and dangerous for those who had no choice but to remain there; it was also a place of flagrant and straightforward criminality on the part of management and ownership.\u201d<\/p>\n

He befriends the children (and their parents) whose lives he is chronicling.\u00a0\u00a0 In a series of often heart-breaking vignettes, Kozol demonstrates the enduring effects of fear, poor nutrition, and lousy schools on children raised in the shelter system.\u00a0\u00a0 But what\u2019s perhaps even more astonishing in these stories is the persistence of hope and the resilience in so many of the children as they fight their way toward adulthood.<\/p>\n

Kozol is active in their lives, too, helping financially and emotionally when he can.\u00a0 The children he calls Jeremy and Pineapple (all the names in the book are pseudonyms) persist despite the odds against them, graduating from college.\u00a0\u00a0 But other children end up in jail or worse, unable to find a lifeline.\u00a0 The story of the woman Kozol calls Antsy and her son, Leonardo, must have been agony for him to write, loaded as it is with such sadness.<\/p>\n

There are heroes here, too, among them Martha Overall, a priest at St Ann\u2019s Episcopal Church, who not only provides spiritual guidance to many of Kozol\u2019s subjects but informally adopts one of the children, too.\u00a0\u00a0 The woman Kozol calls Alice Washington remains loving and optimistic despite the odds.\u00a0 Kozol writes that what attracted him to Alice was \u201cher irreverent sense of humor and her absolute refusal to succumb to the passivity that was induced in many of the others who were living in the Martinique.\u201d\u00a0 Although her life was difficult, Kozol writes that Alice \u201crejected victimhood.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Kozol cloaks her with a well-deserved dignity.<\/p>\n

As I read Fire in the Ashes<\/em> and thought about Kozol\u2019s admirably principled commitment to chronicling the lives of the urban poor, I marveled at his staying power.\u00a0 His tone, too, has been consistent for almost fifty years\u2014cool, smart, empathetic and, despite all the evidence to rebut his convictions, full of hope.\u00a0 Listening to it\u2014and Kozol has a wonderfully conversational style\u2014reminded me of another powerful prophetic writer who appeared on the scene at the same moment as Kozol.<\/p>\n

Ralph Nader\u2019s Unsafe at Any Speed<\/em> indicted Detroit for willingly selling dangerous cars, while Death at an Early Age<\/em>accused the schools of willfully neglecting the educational needs of poor children.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 And while Nader has continued to rail against consumerism and political corruption, the cars we drive today are better in every way than the cars of the sixties\u2014safer, more dependable, longer-lasting.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Reporting from the Margins<\/p><\/div>\n

But our treatment of poor children and our commitment to improving our schools?\u00a0\u00a0 In many ways, it\u2019s worse than ever.\u00a0 We don\u2019t even pay lip service to any plans to improve the lives of the poor.\u00a0\u00a0 Mitt Romney\u00a0proudly announces his contempt for people fallen on hard times,\u00a0faulting them for not being rich like him, which he implies is merely a matter of hard work, ignoring the priviliges coveyed by wealthy parents and access to great schools and universities. \u00a0We\u2019ve acquiesced in equating poverty with crime\u2014we\u2019re better at blaming people for their failings than at finding ways to help.<\/p>\n

We seem to care more for our cars than our kids.\u00a0 This is not a legacy to celebrate.\u00a0 Jonathan Kozol\u2019s brilliant body of work shines a light not merely on the lives of the poor, but into the dark night of the American soul.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Jonathan Kozol, Fire in the Ashes.\u00a0 Twenty-five Years among the Poorest Children in America. Crown Publishers, August 2012, 368 pages,… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":943,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-941","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-reviews"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/theaposition.com\/johnstrawn\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/3\/2012\/09\/Death-at-an-Early-Age.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/theaposition.com\/johnstrawn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/941","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/theaposition.com\/johnstrawn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/theaposition.com\/johnstrawn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theaposition.com\/johnstrawn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theaposition.com\/johnstrawn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=941"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/theaposition.com\/johnstrawn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/941\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":948,"href":"https:\/\/theaposition.com\/johnstrawn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/941\/revisions\/948"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theaposition.com\/johnstrawn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/943"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/theaposition.com\/johnstrawn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=941"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theaposition.com\/johnstrawn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=941"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theaposition.com\/johnstrawn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=941"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}