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

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If you only read one book about the lives of children growing up in poverty in urban America, let it be Jonathan Kozol's Amazing Grace. This is an unpretentious book. The author writes in a clear and graceful style about his visits to the South Bronx and to Harlem. He describes the trip to the South Bronx:"When you enter the train (in Manhattan), you are in the seventh richest congressional district in the nation. When you leave, you are in the poorest." (pg. 3)

Kozol records his conversations with people and discovers what it is like for children to grow up desperately poor. He describes the neighborhood and its people. He lets children and parents speak in their own words about their lives and about how they think the rest of the world views them and their neighborhood.

A 15-year-old girl told him what she believed the rest of the world, affluent America, thought about her community; "It's as if you have been put in a garage where, if they don't have room for something but aren't sure they should throw it out, they put it there where they don't need to think of it again." (p. 38)

Her 16-year-old half sister, Maria, explained further:

"It's not like, 'Well, these babies just aren't dying fast enough. Let's figure our a way to kill some more.' It's not like that at all. It's like—I don't know how to say this…" She holds a Styrofoam cup in her hand and turns it slowly for a moment. "If you weave enough bad things into the fibers of a person's life—sickness and filth, old mattresses and other junk thrown in the streets and other ugly ruined things, and ruined people, a prison here, a sewage there, drug dealers here, the homeless people over there, then give us the very worst schools anyone could think of, hospitals that keep you waiting for ten hours, police that don't show up when someone's dying, take the train that's underneath the street in the good neighborhoods and put it up above where it shuts out the sun, you can guess that life will not be very nice and children will not have much sense of being glad of who they are. Sometimes it feels like we've been buried six feet under their perceptions." (p. 39)

Perhaps the most powerful part of Amazing Grace are Kozol's descriptions of the difficulties welfare recipients have receiving services, the complicated forms, the long waits, and the disrespect they must endure. Amazing Grace will show you that dignity and humanity survive even under the most degraded circumstances.

—Libby Colman, Ph.D.