Jonathan KozolReseñas

I think this might be a decent introductory text for people who are wanting a deeper look into the state of American education. As an educator and as someone who has read others of Kozol's books I didn't find it be all that informative.

I put the book down after reading the first chapter. It has nothing to do with the book being poorly written. It was just from 1992, and I am not interested in reading something that's so outdated.

I put the book down after reading the first chapter. It has nothing to do with the book being poorly written. It was just from 1992, and I am not interested in reading something that's so outdated.

After reading this book, I understand why over the 16 years I was a teacher with the New York City Department of Education I was constantly angry. I don't like social injustice, and I guess I never will.

The children in this book defy the stereotypes of urban youth too frequently presented by the media. Tender, generous and often religiously devout, they speak with eloquence and honesty about the poverty and racial isolation that have wounded but not hardened them.
The book does not romanticize or soften the effects of violence and sickness. One fourth of the child-bearing women in the neighborhoods where these children live test positive for HIV. Pediatric AIDs, life-consuming fires and gang rivalries take a high toll. Several children die during the year in which this narrative takes place.

A gently written work, Amazing Grace asks questions that are at once political and theological. What is the value of a child's life? What exactly do we plan to do with those whom we appear to have defined as economically and humanly superfluous? How cold -- how cruel, how tough -- do we dare be?

My friend Iris gave me her copy of this title when I told her about my socially engaged art practice/project: Who Is My Neighbor. I'm so glad that I included it on my project reading list.

Kozol's essay/story style works so well for me as a reader and provides some inspiration for the way I wish to chronicle my interviews as I talk to my neighbors. My two prompts: 1) Tell me the story about moving into your house. 2) Tell me the story of life in your house in 2020. As a writer, I strive for a generous and honest narrative as I witness and share my neighbors' stories. Kozol combines these with skill and wisdom.

Good writing, for me, cannot come into being unless the writer reads the muscular, vibrant work of other writers. This is what [b:Ordinary Resurrections|51538|Ordinary Resurrections|Jonathan Kozol|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1442803281l/51538._SY75_.jpg|3331547] is for me.

Kozol's righteous outrage is infectious, and I agree with his belief that real desegregation never happened after Brown vs. Board of Education. He has some interesting theories about why this is so: mainly, that the country was tired of thinking about race and wanted to move on. These issues still predominate many urban and suburban school systems, but the political obstacles to real change are formidable. Regardless, equality of access to educational opportunity must be on the top of the list of any reform movement.

Good book about this problem. I was working on my library degree at the time.

12/6/22

12/6/22

2006 (original 1988), paperback, Three Rivers Press
P.8:
" 'yes, there are new jobs,' a minister said. 'There's a new McDonald's and a burger king. You can take home $450 in a month from jobs like that. That might barely pay the rent. What do you do if somebody gets sick? What do you do for food and clothes? These may be good jobs for a teenager. Can you ask a 30-year-old man who's worked for G.M. Since he was 18 to keep his wife and kids alive on jobs like that? There are jobs cleaning rooms in the hotel you're staying at. Can you expect a single mother with three kids to hold her life together with that kind of work? All you hear about these days are so-called service jobs -- it makes me wonder where America is going. If we aren't producing anything of value, will we keep our nation going on hamburger stands? Who is all this "service" for, if no one's got a real job making something of real worth?' "

P.15-16:
"What distinguishes housing from other basic needs of life? Why, of many essentials, is it the first to go?
Housing has some unique characteristics, as urban planning specialist Chester Hartman has observed. One pays for housing well in advance. The entire month's rent must be paid on the first day of any rental period. One pays for food only a few days before it is consumed, and one always has the option of delaying food expenditures until just prior to eating. Housing is a non-divisible and not easily adjustable expenditure. 'one cannot pay less rent for the next month by not using the living room,' Hartman observes. By contrast, one can rapidly and drastically adjust one's food consumption: for example, by buying less expensive food, eating less, or skipping meals...."

P.45:
"Some, but not all, welfare hotel owners make large contributions to political campaigns in New York City. Mister Horn and his partners, who received the largest business, make the largest contributions.
One of their hotels, the Jamaica Arms, was selected by the city to house 90 families with sick children. This building belonged to the city in 1982; it had been seized from former owners in default of taxes. Instead of keeping the site to operate a humane shelter, the city sold it to a private corporation for $75,000. It was then resold to its present owners for $200,000. 'the city,' writes Thehe Voice, 'now pays about $1.2 million a year to house families in a building it owned 4 years ago.'
since 1980, the owners of this building have contributed over $100,000 to the electoral campaigns of City officials, several of whom determine housing policy."

P.46-7:
" 'City policy toward the homeless,' according to a task force of the American Psychiatric Association, 'is best described as one that lurches from court order to court order... Harvests of waste rather than economies of scale are reaped when crisis management becomes the modus operandi...' This, in the opinion of most homeless advocates in New York city, is the first important explanation [why NYC keeps on wasting public funds to shelter homeless people in such dangerous hotels].
Reverend Tom Nees, director of the Community of Hope, a nonprofit shelter in Washington, D.C., speaks to the same point in describing the response of government officials in that city. 'They're just putting out fires,' he observes, 'and picking up the bodies.' This is an inevitable result when crisis management replaces wise, farsighted planning.
A second explanation is provided by Kim Hopper and Jill Hamberg in a paper written for the Community Service Society of New York. Their words, although directed to the crisis in New York, apply to the entire nation.
'the pace, form, and vagaries of contemporary relief efforts,' they write, '-- their reputed "failures" in short -- may be read as signaling the re-emergence of an older disciplinary agenda. Specifically, they portend the return to a style of assistance that, while alleviating some distress, accepts humiliation as the price of relief and upholds the examples of its labors as a deterrent to potential applicants for help.' "

On fostering children taken away from un-housed families:
P.104-5:
"The dollar cost of juvenile placement are the least important; even these are quite astonishing. The cost of placement for a child is who is too severely damaged to be suited for an ordinary foster home -- one who requires placement, for example, in a low security institution -- ranges from $25,000 up to $50,000 yearly. In cases where children are believed to need more careful supervision, costs may be as high as $80,000.
Shortages of space in juvenile homes, moreover, frequently compel the court to place the child in an institution which is also home to serious offenders. The status offender and the genuine offender (one who, were he older, would have been condemned to prison) live together in such institutions. The status offender learns survival strategies from those with whom he dwells and must contend. Soon enough, the categories that divide them become academic. The child whose sole offense had been a status that compelled compassionate attention from the state now becomes apprenticed to those who are competent in real offenses. he learns to struggle, to connive, to lie, and to fight back.
With few exemptions, children placed in institutions of this sort mature in time into adult offenders. The cost of their adult incarceration may be less than that of juvenile detention ($40,000 yearly in an average cost for prison maintenance of adults at the present time in New York City), but there are additional expenses that cannot be measured: damage to victims and to properties; cost required to provide police protection for the law abiding citizen; costs of litigation, prosecution, and defense; and all the other billions squandered as the seemingly inevitable price of our initial willingness to countenance the institutional assault upon these children in their early years."

One thing I resent the most about the country that I was born in, is the teaching to me as a child that my country is not chueco. You would hear about mexico, and how corrupt the officials are. Others would tell me, when I would mention this, "your country is just as corrupt; it's just hidden."
As I grew older and more disillusioned with my country, how true I have found that out to be. This book was published originally in 1988. It's now 2021, so how many times worse has this problem gotten? the gradual but purposeful pushing of the working class into unhoused status, into sickness and death, of their children being pushed into becoming criminals?

This is a beautiful book. It’s an ode to a beloved person who is living inside a stranger. The author and son, Jonathan Kozol, visits his father, Dr. Harry Kozol, who suffers from Alzheimer’s disease, in a care facility. The son carefully records his interactions with his dad— noting both the deterioration in his father’s thinking process, and also the sudden bright spots of memory that deeply endear him to his dad. In addition, Jonathan brings his dog, Persnickity, to visit his father who becomes quite fond of this canine.

Jonathan notes which personnel who care for his dad most appreciate his father by how they actively interact with him. The son expresses disdain for people who talk “over” others with cognitive defects, treating those affected as if they are not an active part of a surrounding conversation. Later, Jonathan moves his father out of the care facility back into the home in which he lived with his wife prior to his mental deterioration.

I liked that the author talked about issues that were related to his parents, but not specifically about them — the idea that some individuals believe older people lose their worth to society and are seen as more expendable and also the idea that some medical practitioners are not as “on the ball” as we expect them to be. This latter issue left me particularly uneasy.

What I liked most about this book was the author’s love and devotion to both parents. It came across clearly, page after page, until the end. What a beautiful tribute to both of the author’s parents this memoir is.

I found the epilogue to be especially stirring. In it, the author’s father reversed a previous demand that Jonathan give up his employment fighting for social justice and instead go into a more academic-oriented career. He relented to his son with the words to encourage Jonathan to follow his own heart, saying “You’re going to be fine.”

I would love to read other books by this author. He has such a sensitivity for others, and I like how he expresses this in words. This is a book written with love and respect, and for that I found it warm and endearing. It did a job on my heartstrings. Read it if you have/had parents whom you love/loved despite any difficulties they suffer/suffered.

ok, made some good points that were new about what actually makes the situation of inner city teaching hard and then some obvious points with an agenda

really paints a dim outlook for the future without any real solution

While the circumstances in these 1988-1990 scenarios may be different from today’s particular circumstances, the principles still stand. There is an inequity in the education of our children in many school districts, especially in urban districts that represent the highest concentration of children in poverty. The promise of Brown vs Board of Education, much less that of Plessy vs Ferguson, has not been achieved. Much as the laws of Jim Crow have been circumvented by “nice white people” so the ways in which we finance schools and educate our citizens have been thwarted by circumvention. School choice, reliance on test scores, method of funding have all played a part in the erosion of our schools, and have helped to fuel the dissension we see in our culture and on social media. Kozol ends this award-winning book with this statement: “There is a deep-seated reverence for fair play in the United States, and in many areas of life we see the consequences in a genuine distaste for loaded dice; but this is not the case in education, health care, or inheritance of wealth. In these elemental areas we want the game to be unfair and we have made it so; and it will likely so remain.” Unfortunately, we have not been able to prove him wrong.

I wanted to read this book for a couple reasons -- one because I loved so many of the books wherein Kozol has chronicled the ills of society and issues of social justice. As an educator, I particularly valued Kozol's books about education. Secondly, I too have faced what Kozol faced, experiencing the "theft of memory" losing my mother one day at a time. The brilliance and aptness of the title grabbed me, as did the narrative of Kozol's deeply personal book. His father was not just anyone suffering from Alzheimers but a leading specialist in the area of brain research. Thus Dr. Kozol had a grasp of what was happening to him. While I appreciated that unique perspective, what struck even more story of the father son relationship. Although a very different book for Kozol, it did not disappoint.

I have long admired Jonathan Kozol as a writer, an advocate, and a person. His latest book explores the complex issues of caring for aging parents with his characteristic clarity and grace. Both his parents lived past the age of 100 and he did his utmost to keep them healthy, at home, and content. The book primarily focuses on his relationship with his father, an esteemed psychiatrist and neurologist. Among his father's papers, the son discovers connections with Eugene O'Neill and other famous and infamous patients. But to me, those revelations were of more interest to biographers and historians. Most of us will be more fascinated with how his father can precisely identify what he is experiencing as Alzheimer's begins to interfere with his thoughts and memory. And many of us will find deep meaning in Jonathan's efforts to maintain his parents' integrity and personality as long as possible.

read this book when studying to be a teacher for like a year and it was really really good, gave a wonderful exposure of what it was like to be a teacher and how to manage that landscape. really emphasized empathetic connection with students and parents. teaching is revolutionary i'm telling you, the people who study teaching at like a core philosophical level and the university level are all fucking breadpilled i swear to god. like pedagogy of the oppressed? cmon son. jonathan kozol? community based teaching and localized, individualized instruction combined with a true and deep sense of equality and mutual discovery to inspire future learning?? cmon son. shit is revolutionary as hell and getting a first hand account of that is really inspiring.

I was reading this when I was attending the National Writing Project. Here is what I wrote in my journal back then:

>>It was one of the most infuriating and outrageous books I have read. Kozol is very able to illuminate how humanity can allow humanity to suffer through indifference and lack of compassion. The stories of homeless children simply wrench your heart as the reader is angered by the way in which the government bureaucracy simply allows people to live in subhuman conditions.

Kozol shatters the stereotype of the homeless as bums, people uneducated who have nothing to offer. As it turns out, many of these homeless were well-employed people who were hit by tragedy; loss of job, divorce, illness can all combine to bring any of us to an EAU (Emergency Assistance Unit) in search of a shelter. This is the most scary aspect of Kozol's book, the ease with which any of us can fall into homelessness. However, it does not end there.

Kozol provides specific stories of homeless families, of children who are basically allowed to die while the wheels of bureaucracy slowly grind. He also writes of those who profit from human misery and of the overburdened heroes struggling to restore some humanity to those whom the system views mostly as a number-a social security number, a Medicare number, a welfare case number, a bed in a shelter number, a body bound for Potter's Field number.

While the book was written in the 80s, all the reader needs to do is watch or read the news to see the situation has not changed. Thus the book is just as relevant today as it was a decade ago. The fact that the situation remains the same serves to validate his assessment that this country does not view homelessness as a crisis but as something to be swept under the rug. Overall, I found the book to be an eye-opener, a necessary piece of reading not just for activists but for each of us.
I wrote that in my journal a little over ten years ago, and it is scary to see now that the book is still relevant, maybe more so now. Sad however is the fact that no politician in the upcoming 2008 election even seems to have any idea about the issue or even be concerned about it. I have gone on to read and enjoy Kozol's other books. Infuriating at times, yes, but worth reading.

I usually like Kozol's works, but this one I had to drop after a while and scan. Kozol as always brings to life the situation of neglected schools and children in this country. And as he is also good at conveying a sense of outrage at how this nation simply chooses to abandon a large group of their own children. However, this particular book is extremely depressing. As an educator, I just found myself wondering if there was any hope at all. I mean, we can document the atrocity of separating children and then neglecting them. But somehow I just don't see any changes or hope that things will change. And once you reach that conclusion, the book just spirals down into a depressing and grim scenario. It's a heavy read overall, and yet, one that many educators and parents as well as those interested in education should read. I give it only two stars because the book basically left me drained. Kozol simply piles up the facts and evidence along with the children's stories. It is hard not to be outraged, and harder to keep some hope. I wish I could be more optimistic, but I don't think I can be. People have to choose change, and I get the feeling simply burying the problem is easier for them, even as we need to educate all our children if we are to have a good future.

I will likely read Kozol's other books, if he writes something new. After all, I have read most of his other books (which I have enjoyed, even if they left me outraged at times), and I even met him once. But this one was a bit too heavy for me. For teachers, I would recommend Savage Inequalities and his Letters book.

In brief: every new teacher needs this book.

See my blog post on it:

http://gypsylibrarian.blogspot.com/2008/01/booknote-jonathan-kozols-letters-to.h...

It is hard to find words to express what I think about this novel. The content is not ground breaking. It is the experience of the ghetto through the eyes of a middle class white man. The experiences in this book may not seem special to those millions who experience it every day. However, for the people who live sheltered like me, this book is a powerful instrument for exposing the profound evil, the genocide perpetrated by this nation against its own people every single day.

I read this book after wanting to find a good book about homelessness, so that in my monthly prayer group I could be more mindful when I prayed on that topic. From the moment I started reading it, I couldn't tear myself away! Yes, the data was from a good few decades ago, but what happened when I was reading was that it made me recall how I remembered my local community back then, the economic struggles, my first time ever seeing "bag ladies" rummaging through trash cans, and things like that. I could better understand from reading the results of poorly managed shelters how desperate the downtrodden could become, and did.

I appreciated the author's accounts of speaking with so many people from different walks of life, who all ended up homeless, and in despair, even if they had jobs. It was a depressing book at times, made me cry and want to go right the world, but at the end of the day, it was an eye-opening read that I think everyone needs to read if ever they hope to be in non-profits or to even just help out their local church's community outreach endeavors. I honestly couldn't put the book down, or stop talking about its points with my friends!

So happy I found this book. It filled a place in my heart that previously only was filled when working with children.

This was the first book I won through a Goodreads giveaway! Although I thought there was a lot of emotion behind this book, which I admired so much, the end result was a little disjointed and disorganized. I loved all of the material concerning his father and his mother as they were struggling through their old age, as well as all of the anecdotes about their various caretakers. However, there were some parts about Dr. Kozol that Jonathan wrote that seemed an awful lot like "here's some stuff that my father did that I found in his files." These sections weren't compelling, perhaps because of the second hand way it was told. Although I'm sure Dr. Kozol's relationships with Eugene O'Neill, Patty Hearst, and the Boston strangler were interesting, the manner in which they were presented here was lacking in urgency and personality.

Simply put, this book is a report on how minorities in America are compelled to live in segregated schools with a fraction of the support that affluent white schools receive. The author is a good writer, but I take exception with his presentation. His whole argument could have been presented in a quarter of the space. A huge percentage of the book consists of examples of where white/affluent schools are good and minority/poor schools are trash. Fine, I believe him. I believed him after the first three or four detailed examples. I didn't need a dozen more examples. The author does eventually get around to reasons why the differences are so great and so prevalent and why the "haves" are making sure the "have-nots" stay that way. He also presents that case well, and much more concisely. However, he does little to say what we, the readers, should do about it, especially since he points out how strong the human element is for "protecting" what we have. Some reviewers of this book commented on how "angry" the author was. I'm sure he was, but it doesn't come through in his writing, unless you feel that pointing out injustice as poor manners. And for what it's worth, I finished reading this book the same day of the Newtown school shooting. Despite the horror and sadness of that event, the book had me thinking and wondering how that tragedy to a white affluent community compared to the day-after-day, year-after-year tragedy of poor minorities living with substandard schools, housing, and environmentally trashed neighborhoods.