Jonathan Kozol's Amazing Grace
While reading Amazing Grace, one is unable to escape the seemingly endless tales of hardship and pain. The setting behind this gripping story is the South Bronx of New York City, with the main focus on the Mott Haven housing project and its surrounding neighborhood. Here black and Hispanic families try to cope with the disparity that surrounds them. Mott Haven is a place where children must place in the hallways of the building, because playing outside is to much of a risk. The building is filled with rats and cockroaches in the summer, and lacks heat and decent water in the winter. This picture of the "ghetto" is not one of hope, but one of fear. Even the hospitals servicing the neighborhoods are dirty and lack the staff that is needed for quality basic care. If clean bed sheets are needed the patients must put them on themselves. This book is filled with stories of real people and their struggles. Each story, though different in content, has the same basic point, survival.
On a tour given by Cliffie ( a 7 year old that Kozol met in the local church) , the reader gets to see the neighborhood through the eyes of a child. Cliffie shows the reader a once green park, that is now dried up and brown with teddy bears hanging from the limbs of tree branches com a children killed from that area. Further down the block, the place where they "burn bodies of people" is pointed out. It turns out that it was an incinerator for hazardous waste products transported from New York City hospitals. Nope, no bodies just things like the occasional amputated limb, fetal tissue, needles, soiled bedding, and used bandages are piled up until they can be burned. On days that they burn the air is heavy and...
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...he problems. The problems do not root from one individual nor do they stop at another, they are constantly reoccurring despite the different situations. This method just adds to the intensity of the problems. When you shut the book or go to sleep at night the problems do not just end, they keep on growing. Kozol leaves his stories without conclusions. He makes no assumptions, nor does he spiel some politically correct rhetoric as to how things could be better. The point is the shock that there is no easy solution. The problems never end. In the conclusion of his book he lists the names of all those who died within the time span it took to complete his book. The only conclusion he offers is a lists of senseless deaths that never ends.
Works Cited:
Kozol, Jonathan. Amazing Grace: The Lives of Children and the Conscience of a Nation. New York: Harper, 1996.
In the book “There Are No Children Here” by Alex Kotlowitz, the author followed the lives of two young brothers (Lafayette and Pharoah) while they grew up in the harsh streets of Chicago in the late 1980’s. The author uses the story of the two boys’ lives to discuss the social divide in our very own society and to persuade readers that there is a major problem in “the projects” of the United States.
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Briggs, D. (2013). In age of Oprah, belief in miracles rises. Christian Century, 130(2), 15-16.
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