Ordinary Resurrections by Jonathan Kozol

Ranging in age from six to 12, all of the children in Kozol's empathetic, leisurely portraits are black or Hispanic some know hunger many have lost at least one relative to AIDS a large number of them see their fathers only when they visit them in prison. Ann's Church, a neighborhood Episcopalian congregation that reaches out to the hungry and homeless. The tone here is more optimistic, partly because his extended conversations and interactions with children take place not only at public elementary schools, but also at a supportive after-school center run by St. As usual for Kozol, the details he illustrates can be sad, funny, and moving, but by focusing on children, he offers a faint glimmer of hope that the next generation might right the wrongs perpetuated before them.A persistent voice of conscience, Kozol poses the question: do we want our schools to remain segregated and unequal? The National Book Award-winning education activist revisits Mott Haven, a poverty-stricken section of the South Bronx that was the setting for his two previous books, Amazing Grace and Savage Inequalities. Though Kozol does have a streak of hectoring in him, for the most part his subjects-here primarily a trio of precocious first-graders named Elio, Pineapple, and Ariel-speak for him, providing an illuminating view of how these children see a world where fathers reside 'upstate,' shootings are commonplace, and schools struggle to stay afloat without funding. As is his habit, he lets the children he meets speak freely in their own words, listening rather than lecturing and relating what he finds to the reader. Ordinary Resurrections returns Kozol to New York's forgotten underclass, but his creeping old age and the illness of his parents makes this voyage more personal. His experiences were detailed in Amazing Grace, but the people he encountered, specifically the children, called for a second book. In the early '90s, Kozol-a white Harvard grad and '60s activist-spent time in some of the poorest neighborhoods of the South Bronx.

Jonathan Kozol first sounded the wake-up call about the state of the American poor with his book Death At An Early Age, and 30 years later his quest to illuminate the plight of the disadvantaged hasn't reached its conclusion if anything, it's intensified. After all, talking about a group of people is different from talking with a group of people, and statistics can only illustrate so much.

So much energy has been expended discussing and debating the plight of the inner-city poor that the lives of the poor themselves sometimes seem to fall by the wayside.

Ordinary Resurrections by Jonathan Kozol