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

by Jonathan Kozol Narrated by Dick Hill

Overview

Amazing Grace is an audiobook about about the hearts of children who grow up in the South Bronx-the poorest congressional district of our nation.

The children we meet through the deepening friendships that evolve between Jonathan Kozol and their families defy the stereotypes of urban youth too frequently presented on TV and in newspapers. Tender, generous, and often religiously devout, they speak with painful clarity about the poverty and racial isolation that have wounded but not hardened them.

"It's not like being in a jail," says 15-year-old Isabel. "It's more like being hidden. It's as if you have been put in a garage where, if they don't have room for something but aren't sure if they should throw it out, they put it there where they don't need to think of it again."

Without rhetoric, but drawing extensively upon the words of children, parents, and priests, this book does not romanticize or soften the effects of violence and sickness. Amazing Grace makes clear that the postmodern ghetto of America is not a social accident but is created and sustained by greed, neglect, racism, and expedience. It asks questions like-what is the value of child's life? What do we plan to do with those whom we have decided are superfluous? How tough do we dare to be?

Editorial Reviews

From the Publisher

Gripping, informative, deeply moral, and profoundly disturbing.” –Boston Globe

“A powerful book…as good as a blessing.” –Washington Post Book World

“Heartrending…This volume has the tone and power of elegy.” –Los Angeles Times

“Amazing Grace is good in the old-fashioned sense: beautiful and morally worthy…I thank you for the language of this book, its refusal to patronize, to exoticize these children, and its insistence upon taking what they say, feel, and think seriously.” –Toni Morrison

“Amazing! A marvelous achievement.” –Henry Louis Gates Jr.

“At a time when Americans are struggling to see through the political, racial, and economic walls that separate them, Jonathan Kozol comes along with a window. Like an Old Testament patriarch, he rages at what he calls the greed and ‘theological evil’ of our time.” –Anita Manning, USA Today

“An often stirring and shocking…portrait of the dire poverty of these young inner-city lives. A Labor of love by a deeply humane man.” –Lisa Shea, Elle

“It is powerful stuff: uplifting with its tales of those who survive amid the destruction; depressing because of the many lives that poverty kills, almost literally from the womb.” –Lewis Beale, New York Daily News
 
“Surely deserving of a Pulitzer.” –Philadelphia Daily News
 
“In this stunningly simple and eloquent book, Jonathan Kozol continues to be our voice in the wilderness of America’s childhood.” –Susan Campbell, Hartford Courant
 
“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…A well-reported and –crafted book that asks tough questions and hurts you to read.”—June Arney, Virginian-Pilot
 
“There must be something special about Kozol—a warmth, a gentleness, a kind of mournful decency—that brings out the extraordinary in others. He knows how to ask questions, to listen patiently, and to treat the answers he gets with a respect that borders on courtliness…Kozol is an important wrtier, but he is also an important presence.” –Kai Erikson, The Nation
 
“Jonathan’s struggle is noble, his appeal urgent. What he says must be heard. His outcry must shake our nation out of its guilty indifference.” –Elie Wiesel
 
“A superb book. I was alternately moved to tears and outrage.” –Rabbi David Saperstein
 
“A profound book about New York, painting a portrait of where we really are in our municipal life and reminding all of us, but particularly those of us in government, of hose much work we must do if we have any claim to having a moral center.” –Ruth Messinger, former Manhattan borough president
 
“Awesome and important.” –Gwendolyn Brooks
 
“Jonathan Kozol has been for a generation now a dedicated emissary who dares leave the comfortable world to which he was born and in which he was educated for those ‘other’ neighborhoods that so many of us, these days, try to put out of our minds. His ‘grace,’ then, is also ‘amazing’—his tenacious insistence that he himself not forget what is morally at stake for all of us in the South Bronx and places like it across the land.” –Robert Coles, author of The Moral Life of Children
 
“Kozol reminds us that, with each casualty, part of the beauty of the world is extinguished, because these are children of intelligence and humor, of poetic insight and luminous faith. Amazing Grace is written in a gentle and measured tone, but you will wonder at the end, with Kozol, why the God of love does not return to earth with his avenging sword in hand.”—Barbara Ehrenreich, author or Nickel and Dimed and Bait and Switch
 
“A beautiful and passionate book about the lives of the people in the South Bronx. By capturing the moral courage, eloquence, and spiritual resilience of his subjects, Jonathan Kozol has created a moving and critical narrative written I the spirit of the gospels, infused with love and steeped in the principles of justice.” –Paulo Freire, author of Pedagogy of the Oppressed
 
“Very powerful—it may turn out to be one of the books of our times…This is a remarkable book; I encourage all Americans to buy it and read it.” –Marian Wright Edelman, President, Children’s Defense Fund
 
“The extraordinary thing about Mr. Kozol’s writing is that God’s presence in poor children comes through as light in the darkness. I believe Amazing Grace to be the finest book of its kind.”—Rt. Rev. Paul Moore, Episcopal Bishop of New York
 
“A compelling and powerful portrait of the tragic harm so many children suffer in urban America. As always, Jonathan Kozol’s work is taut and elegiac, memorable and haunting.” —David J. Garrow, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Bearing the Cross

Product Details

BN ID:	2940169875010
Publisher:	Brilliance Audio
Publication date:	02/19/2010
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

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.
   Fear and anxiety are common. Many cannot sleep.
   Asthma is the most common illness among children here. Many have to struggle to take in a good deep breath. Some mothers keep oxygen tanks, which children describe as "breathing machines," next to their children's beds.
The houses in which these children live, two thirds of which are owned by the City of New York, are often as squalid as the houses of the poorest children I have visited in rural Mississippi, but there is none of the greenness and the healing sweetness of the Mississippi countryside outside their windows, which are often barred and bolted as protection against thieves.
   Some of these houses are freezing in the winter. In dangerously cold weather, the city sometimes distributes electric blankets and space heaters to its tenants. In emergency conditions, if space heaters can't be used, because substandard wiring is overloaded, the city's practice, according to Newsday, is to pass out sleeping bags.
   "You just cover up ... and hope you wake up the next morning," says a father of four children, one of them an infant one month old, as they prepare to climb into their sleeping bags in hats and coats on a December night.
   In humid summer weather, roaches crawl on virtually every surface of the houses in which many of the children live. Rats emerge from holes in bedroom walls, terrorizing infants in their cribs. In the streets outside, the restlessness and anger that are present in all seasons frequently intensify under the stress of heat.
   In speaking of rates of homicide in New York City neighborhoods, the Times refers to the streets around St. Ann's as "the deadliest blocks" in "the deadliest precinct" of the city. If there is a deadlier place in the United States, I don't know where it is.
   In 1991, 84 people, more than half of whom were 21 or younger, were murdered in the precinct. A year later, ten people were shot dead on a street called Beckman Avenue, where many of the children I have come to know reside. On Valentine's Day of 1993, three more children and three adults were shot dead on the living room floor of an apartment six blocks from the run-down park that serves the area.
   In early July of 1993, shortly before the first time that I visited the neighborhood, three more people were shot in 30 minutes in tree unrelated murders in the South Bronx, one of them only a block from St. Ann's Avenue. A week later, a mother was murdered and her baby wounded by a bullet in the stomach while they were standing on a South Bronx corner. Three weeks after that, a minister and elderly parishioner were shot outside the front door of their church, while another South Bronx resident was discovered in his bathtub with his head cut off. In subsequent days, a man was shot in both his eyes and a ten-year-old was critically wounded in the brain.
   What is it like for children to grow up here? What do they think the world has done to them? Do they believe that they are being shunned or hidden by society? If so, do they think that they deserve this? What is it that enables some of them to pray? When they pray, what do they say to God?

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