A wrenching cri de coeur from a section of New York City where drugs, AIDS, cold, hunger, and rats who feed on babies are part of a child's everyday world. Kozol is a tireless witness to the travesty of childhood experienced by so many young Americans. As politicians slash budgets, pronouncing that the poor have only themselves to blame, and academics argue about the rise and fall of the bell curve, he writes about the wretched lives of children whose families are racked by illness, tragedy, violenceand, yes, drugs, alcohol, and teenage pregnancy. What makes Kozol's books (Savage Inequalities, 1991, etc.) so powerful is their simplicity. They are graphic observations of life in urban neighborhoods that are, literally and figuratively, the garbage dumps of the privileged. For this volume he spends time in the Mott Haven section of New York City's South Bronx, a 15-minute subway ride from Manhattan's elite East Side. There the Hispanic and black residents are among the ``poorest of the poor''median household income is $7,600 a year, or $147 a week to cover rent, food, clothes, transportation, roach powder, cleaning supplies, phone calls, and attendance at funerals. More than one-third of their number are children. The children suffer depression and anxiety; a disproportionate number are asthmatics. These children are taught to crawl on their stomachs away from windows when they hear gunshots. What about the ``breakdown of the family''? Says a minister: ``Everything breaks down in a place like this . . . the pipes . . . the phone . . . the electricity and heat. Why wouldn't the family break down also?'' What is remarkable is that under these circumstances these same children laugh, draw happy pictures, eat ices, and share the pizza slice that is their dinner with someone hungrier. This time, Kozol has no answers; he does pass along some comfort (borrowed from a local church) in the form of the last verse of ``Amazing Grace'': ``Through many dangers, toils, and snares . . . grace will lead me home.'' (Author tour)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-517-79999-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1995
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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