Book Review Of Savage Inequalities By Jonathan Kozol

Savage Inequalities is a book written by Jonathan Kozol in 1991 that documents the injustices in educational systems of mainly inner-city schools within the United States. He traveled to different cities such as East St. Louis, New York, Chicago, and Camden. A common trend throughout Kozol’s visits is the overcrowded, unhygienic, and understaffed conditions of the schools. Many of the inner-city schools lacked basic materials, textbooks, science lab tools, and even classrooms. Some of the people he conversed with are those who the schools were composed of: principals, teachers, and above all, children. By doing so, Kozol was better able to give an insight into the daily struggles that thousands of students faced. He was also able to capture

Similarly to New York, East St. Louis residents handled their fair share of poor health problems. However, East St. Louis was home to so many worse health-related injustices that many of its residents might have dreamed of moving to a low-income neighborhood in New York. East St. Louis was devastated by the “sewage running in the streets, air that has been fouled by the local plants, the high lead levels noted in the soil, … [and] insufficient health care” (Kozol 25). This quotation illustrates the magnitude of the potential health issues that derive from awful environmental conditions. Nearby businesses in the city didn’t care about the negative externalities they were producing. As a result, the residents of the city were forced to suffer. East St. Louis’s problem with infant death holds more grievance than the dental problems of some children in New York. East St. Louis ranked first out of 66 cities in Illinois “for fetal death, first in premature birth, and third in infant death. ...Hospital care is deficient too. There is no place to have a baby in East St. Louis. The infant death rate is still rising” (Kozol 25). This shows the very poor conditions that the residents had to endure. With no place to properly deliver a baby, combined with the already poor environmental conditions, it’s no wonder that the rates of infant and fetal death were so high. Unfortunately, the health problems didn’t stop there. Residents of this city were malnourished and many were not immunized. “Compounding these health problems is the poor nutrition of the children here--average daily food expenditure in East St. Louis is $2.40 for one child--and the underimmunization of young children. Of every 100 children recently surveyed in East St. Louis, 55 were incompletely immunized for polio, diphtheria, measles and whooping cough” (Kozol 26). This quotation continues to