Amazing Grace

The Lives of Children and the Conscience of a Nation

By: Jonathan Kozol

Narrated by: Dick Hill

Length: 9 hrs and 19 mins

Publisher's summary

Amazing Grace is a book 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 Janathan 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?

©1996 Jonathan Kozol (P)2010 Brilliance Audio, Inc.

I love this book, it really made me happy

this book made me happy and helped me feel better because I looked at my life differently than i had before.

Just not fair.

Excellent book! Opened my eyes to the injustices of the haves and have not's. Basic services and schools should be funded in according to their needs, not their tax base.

The Roots of Change are in Education

Listening to Dick Hill's impassioned delivery of Kozol's all-too-real description of the lives of children in the South Bronx 30 years ago is taking me back to Jonathan Kozol’s Death at an Early Age—a book that changed my life 50 years ago. The story he has been telling has been the same since then: to root out inequality and prejudice, you have to start at the root: Early Childhood Education and K-12 programs.

If you’re looking for a way to confront white privilege deeply during this time of searching for healing responses to the divisions in our society, dig into Jonathan Kozol’s work. You will see through different eyes. And, no offense, @DickHill, I truly enjoyed listening to you, but a white man doing black street vernacular doesn’t age well.

Eye-Opening

This book is eye-opening and very well written. The stories told in from the children and Mrs. Washington will not soon be forgotten. This book should be shared among friends and family. Many times I described it to friends and family and they were amazed they didn't know how poor and segregated the South Bronx community was. THis is a hard read in that it is emotional and will and should make you feel things. Enjoy.

A Poignant Look at the South Bronx in the 1990s

I think this book would have had much more of an impact if I'd read it back in 1995 when it was first published. The cold sad truth is that these stories are now all-too-familiar in many impoverished neighborhoods around our nation including in my own city of Birmingham, Alabama. Although I have not studied the statistics, my gut tells me that the income gap between the poorest poor and the richest rich in New York City has widened substantially since this book was written. The New York Times, however, reported just this year about the number of middle class professionals, many of them white, moving into the neighborhoods described in Jonathan Kozol's book. Apparently the attraction is affordable real estate, an increasingly safe neighborhood where major crime has plummeted over the past 20 years, and a reasonable commute to jobs in Manhatten. I'm pleased to hear that the reputation of the neighborhood is changing for what appears to be the better but I would be very interested in a follow up book on the children highlighted in "Amazing Grace." Where are they today and have those precious children benefited from the enhancements and improvements in their neighborhood? My prayers may have already been answered as Kozol's newest book, Fire in the Ashes, which was published in August 2012 does just that.

Useless

The book is badly dated. The content described poverty in the 1990's and is mostly the story of one or two adults and a few teenagers living in NYC. It is not a story of children living in poverty.