Free Essays - Amazing Grace

Within the next few pages here I intend to address two issues. First I will try to give a personal review of what I saw this book to hold, and second I will try explain the revelence which this book has to the field of Public Administration. First try to picture children in a slum where the squalor in their homes is just as bad as that which is in the streets. Where prostitution is rampant, thievery a common place and murder and death a daily occurrence. Crack-cocaine and heroin are sold in corner markets, and the dead eyes of men and women wandering about aimlessly in the streets of Mott Haven are all to common., Their bodies riddled with disease, disease which seems to control the neighborhood. This is Mott Haven, in New York City's South Bronx, the outback of this

American nation's poorest congressional district, also the setting of Jonathan Kozol's disturbing representation of poverty in this country. The stories, which are captured

Amazing Grace, are told in the simplest terms. They are told by children who have seen their parents die of AIDS and other disease, by mothers who complain about teenagers bagging dope and loading guns on fire escapes, by clergy who teach the poor to fight injustice and by police who are afraid to answer 911 calls. Kozol seems to be disparage about the situation of the poor in American today, especially when more and more the poor are blamed for being poor. Kozol’s portrait of life in Mott Haven is gentle and passionate. Even though rats may chew through apartment walls in the homes of Mott

Haven, the children still say their prayers at night. What seems to bother Kozol is that many people do not even want to look at this picture of America, but in Amazing Grace he dares us to recognize it does exist.

Kozol spent a year wandering through Mott Haven and its neighboring communities; visiting churches, schools, hospitals, parks, and homes. Talking with parents and kids, social workers, religious leaders, and principals and teachers; struggling to try to understand how these children and parents cope with poverty and violence. Kozol trys to determine how their fellow citizens can tolerate, even demand policies that guarantee misery and death for those living a few subway stops north of glitzy midtown Manhattan.

Perhaps nothing can halt the tides of social policy where citizens of this nation are allowed to live in such conditions. If on the other hand anything can, it may be Kozol's forecasting visions and the openness and humanity of the remarkable people whose