Fire in the Ashes: Twenty-Five Years Among the Poorest Children in America, by Jonathon Kozol
Jonathon Kozol’s still at it.
Tho he turned 76 last week, he hasn’t lost any of the fire and outrage he’s had since his first experiences in the Boston public schools in 1964.
Thirteen books later (Death at an Early Age was his first one), he continues his crusade to wake up America to the injustices that our public schools and our public policies foist on poor kids and their families.
In his newest book, Fire in the Ashes, Kozol writes about the children (many now in their 20s or older) and the parents he got to know in the infamous Martinique welfare hotel in NYC (” a hell on earth…the cesspool, the worst place in the world you could be with children,” according to one parent who lived there).
Fire in the Ashes is their story. “What happened to these children? What happened to their families? Some prevailed, a few triumphantly. Most survived, even at a rather modest level of survival. Others did not,” he writes in the introduction.
