THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Wednesday, November 22, 1995 TAG: 9511220061
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E3 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY JUNE ARNEY
LENGTH: Medium: 83 lines
IT IS THE children's voices that you'll remember.
They are sometimes sing-song, sometimes matter-of-fact, sometimes sad - but always powerful.
In his latest book, ``Amazing Grace: The Lives of Children and the Conscience of a Nation'' (Crown, 286 pp., $23), Jonathan Kozol gives voice to children of the South Bronx - children who dream their dreams in the poorest congressional district in the nation.
Kozol, a Harvard graduate and Rhodes Scholar, has spent much of a lifetime listening to children. His first book, ``Death at an Early Age,'' won the National Book Award. ``Rachel and Her Children,'' about homeless families, won the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award. And his ``Savage Inequalities'' is a national best seller.
Kozol steps back in ``Amazing Grace'' and lets other people talk. When he does speak, he is honest and understated. Only occasionally does he go too far with his reflections.
He conveys the despair and racism of the streets. Two children pray as they kneel by their beds: ``God bless Mommy. God bless Nanny. God, don't punish me because I'm black.'' But Kozol also shares hope. Twelve-year-old Anthony wants to be a novelist when he grows up.
Kozol started visiting New York's South Bronx in 1993, focusing on Mott Haven, a poor neighborhood that is two-thirds Hispanic and one-third black. There were 21 murders in one six-block area in the two years before he visited. About half the families live on $3,700 a year.
He introduces children such as 7-year-old Cliffie. ``I saw a boy shot in the head right over there,'' Cliffie tells Kozol and then politely asks, ``Would you like a chocolate chip cookie?''
Paradoxes are not lost on Kozol. He absorbs them all. He neither hypes nor sugarcoats. The former teacher is teaching again.
He goes to Children's Park, where stuffed teddy bears hang from trees near the jungle gym, where pushers peddle their drugs and addicts trade dirty needles for clean ones.
During his research, Kozol spent hundreds of hours talking to Alice Washington, a woman who contracted AIDS from a husband she thought had been faithful to her. She was later diagnosed with cancer. Despite such experiences as a two-day wait in the hospital emergency room to be admitted after being diagnosed with pneumonia, she shows her indignation only when she tells Kozol she has trouble getting The New York Times in her neighborhood.
Curious to know why the paper would be so important, Kozol asks her. ``I like to look at the ads and read the social pages,'' she tells him. ``It gives you a feeling that you know what's going on.''
That's another thing that Kozol likes to do - chip away at preconceived notions.
In simple language, the answers to Kozol's questions come.
Jeremiah, 12, tells of the little altars that appear in the streets. ``You hear shooting in the night,'' he tells Kozol. ``Next day, you see a lot of little cardboard boxes, each one with a candle - sometimes flowers, and you see a picture of the person who was killed.''
Maria, who is 16, says: ``If people in New York woke up one day and learned that we were gone, that we simply died or left for somewhere else, how would they feel? I think they'd be relieved.''
Washington's daughter, Charlayne, describes the death of an 8-year-old neighbor, Bernardo Rodriguez, who was killed when a broken elevator door opened after he leaned against it.
The city blamed the family for letting the child go into the hallway. ``But they got to go out somewhere,'' she says. ``Going outside'' for youngsters in the building, she explains, means ``going into the hallway.'' The real outside ``is just too dangerous.''
People figured out what had happened only when the boy's blood began to drip on passengers.
Kozol wants you to step away from the comfortable. He wants you to see the children's magic and to be so shaken by their lives that you demand change.
He offers no solutions in ``Amazing Grace'' - just a well-reported and crafted book that asks tough questions and hurts you to read. ILLUSTRATION: Photo
HARVEY WANG
Jonathan Kozol spent hundreds of hours talking to residents of New
York's South Bronx.
by CNB