Amazing Grace - The Lives of Children and the Conscience of a Nation

Zusatztext 97672405 Informationen zum Autor Jonathan Kozol  is the author of  Death at an Early Age (for which he received the National Book Award),  Savage Inequalities ,  Amazing Grace , and other award-winning books about young children and their public schools. He travels and lectures about educational inequality and racial injustice. Klappentext Amazing Grace is Jonathan Kozol's classic book on life and death in the South Bronx-the poorest urban neighborhood of the United States. He brings us into overcrowded schools, dysfunctional hospitals, and rat-infested homes where families have been ravaged by depression and anxiety, drug-related violence, and the spread of AIDS. But he also introduces us to devoted and unselfish teachers, dedicated ministers, and-at the heart and center of the book-courageous and delightful children. The children we come to meet through the friendships they have formed with Jonathan defy the stereotypes of urban youth too frequently presented by the media. Tender, generous, and often religiously devout, they speak with eloquence and honesty about the poverty and racial isolation that have wounded but not hardened them. Amidst all of the despair, it is the very young whose luminous capacity for love and transcendent sense of faith in human decency give reason for hope.   The Number 6 train from Manhattan to the South Bronx makes nine stops in the 18-minute ride between East 59th Street and Brook Avenue. When you enter the train, you are in the seventh richest congressional district in the nation. When you leave, you are in the poorest.    The 600,000 people who live here and the 450 000 people who live in Washington Heights and Harlem, which are separated from the South Bronx by a narrow river , make up one of the largest racially segregated concentrations of poor people in our nation.    Brook Avenue, which is the tenth stop on the local, lies in the center of Mott Haven, whose 48,000 people are the poorest in the South Bronx. Two thirds are Hispanic, one third black. Thirty-five percent are children. In 1991, the median household income of the area, according to the New York Times , was $7,600.    St. Ann's Church, on St. Ann's Avenue, is three blocks from the subway station. The children who come to this small Episcopal church for food and comfort and to play, and the mothers and fathers who come here Or prayer, are said to be the poorest people in New York. " More than 95 percent are poor," the pastor says-"the poorest of the poor, poor by any standard I can think of." At the elementary school that serves the neighborhood across the avenue, only seven of 800 children do not qualify for free school lunches. "Five of those seven," says the principal, "get reduced-price lunches, because they are classified as only 'poor,' not 'destitute.' "    In some cities, the public reputation of a ghetto neighborhood bears little connection to the world that you discover when you walk thestreets with children and listen to their words. In Mott Haven, this is not the case. By and large, the words of the children in the streets and schools and houses that surround St. Ann's more than justify the grimness in the words of journalists who have described the area.    Crack-cocaine addiction and the intravenous use of heroin, which children I have met here call "the needle drug," are woven into the texture of existence in Mott Haven. Nearly 4,000 heroin injectors, many of whom are HIV-infected, live here. Virtually every child at St. Ann's knows someone, a relative or neighbor, who has died of AIDS, and most children here know many others who are dying now of the disease. One quarter of the women of Mott Haven who are tested in obstetric wards are positive for HIV. Rates of pediatric AIDS, therefore, are high.    Depression is common among children in Mott Haven. Many cry a great deal but cannot explain exactly why.    ...

Product details

• Authors: Jonathan Kozol
• Publisher: Crown Publishing Group
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 26.06.2012
• EAN: 9780770435660
• ISBN: 978-0-7704-3566-0
• No. of pages: 336
• Dimensions: 132 mm x 201 mm x 19 mm
• Subject: Social sciences, law, business > Sociology > Sociological theories