Fire in the Ashes

Starred review from June 18, 2012
National Book Award–winner Kozol (The Shame of the Nation) again traces the workings of “savage inequalities”—this time on a generational timescale—in this engrossing chronicle of lives blighted and redeemed. He follows the fortunes of people he met decades ago in a squalid Manhattan welfare hotel and in the South Bronx’s Mott Haven ghetto, whose stories range from heartbreaking to hopeful: traumatized boys grow into lost and vicious men; teens go to college and beyond with the help of mentors; many drift through years of addiction, violent relationships, and prison before achieving a semblance of stability and focus. These lives are full of choices, good and spectacularly bad, but Kozol highlights the institutional forces that shape them: social service bureaucracies that warehouse the homeless in hellholes; immigration regulations that break up families; the academic “killing fields” of the Bronx’s terrible middle schools; the neighborhood church whose ministries rescue many kids. Eschewing social science jargon and deploying extraordinary powers of observation and empathy, Kozol crafts dense, novelistic character studies that reveal the interplay between individual personality and the chaos of impoverished circumstances. Like a latter-day Dickens (but without the melodrama), he gives us another powerful indictment of America’s treatment of the poor. Agent: Lynn Nesbit, Janklow & Nesbit Associates.

Starred review from August 1, 2012
The award-winning author of Death at an Early Age (1967) tells the stories of the later lives of poor children who grew up in the Bronx. Kozol (Letters to a Young Teacher, 2007, etc.) has worked with children in inner-city schools for 50 years. In this engaging, illuminating, often moving book, he recounts the lives of poor black and Latino children--many now close friends--who once lived in Manhattan's Martinique Hotel and were relocated in the late 1980s upon the closing of that crowded and filthy shelter to Mott Haven, a poor Bronx neighborhood. As the children grew into young adulthood, Kozol kept in touch with them and their families through visits, emails and phone calls. In a series of intimate portraits, he describes the astonishing odds the children faced and how many managed, with the critical help of mentors and caring others, to achieve successful lives, both in the conventional sense of graduating from college, but above all, by becoming kind and loving human beings. There is Leonardo, recruited by a New England boarding school, where he emerged as a leader; the introspective Jeremy, who befriended a Puerto Rican poet, got through college and took a job at a Mott Haven church that is central to the lives of many; and the buoyant, winning Pineapple, whose Guatemalan parents provide the emotional security of a warm home. "I'm going to give a good life to my children," says Lisette, 24, after her troubled brother's suicide. "I have to do it. I'm the one who made it through." Some children are still struggling to find their way, writes the author, but they do so with "the earnestness and elemental kindness" that he first saw in them years ago. Cleareyed, compassionate and hopeful.

COPYRIGHT(2012) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

April 15, 2012

Wrapping up the coverage of a group of inner-city children he began with Rachel and Her Children and Amazing Grace, the National Book Award-winning author of Death at an Early Age follows a group of city kids into adulthood. Look for the galley at BEA.

Copyright 2012 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from August 1, 2012
The children portrayed in Kozol's award-winning Rachel and Her Children (1987) and Amazing Grace (1995) have gone on to overcomeor notthe cruel inequities facing families marginalized by poverty, homelessness, and woefully inadequate public schools. Here Kozol returns to the scene of his previous work to trace the lives of Vicky and her children, Eric and Lisette, who moved from the Bronx to Montana with mixed success, and Alice, who struggles with HIV but maintains an abiding zest for life that she tempers with skepticism. He chronicles the lives of young boys who couldn't escape the low expectations of schools and the lure of the streets, landing in prison and meeting death at an early age while other young boys and girls went on to college and careers. Kozol reveals his own vulnerabilities during the 25 years he knew the families, including facing the illnesses and deaths of his parents. Through letters, phone calls, and visits, Kozol maintained close relationships over the years, mourning with families in their woes and rejoicing in their triumphs. This is an engaging look at the broader social implications of ignoring poverty as well as a very personal look at individuals struggling to overcome it.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)