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    Amazing Grace: The Lives of Children and the Conscience of a Nation
    Amazing Grace: The Lives of Children and the Conscience of a Nation
    Amazing Grace: The Lives of Children and the Conscience of a Nation
    Audiobook9 hours

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

    Written by Jonathan Kozol

    Narrated by Dick Hill

    4/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    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?

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBrilliance Audio
    Release dateFeb 19, 2010
    ISBN9781441841391
    Amazing Grace: The Lives of Children and the Conscience of a Nation
    Author

    Jonathan Kozol

    Jonathon Kozol has been awarded the National Book Award and the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award. His previous books include Amazing Grace and Savage Inequalities. He lives in Byfield, Massachusetts.

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    Reviews for Amazing Grace

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    • 4/5
      A simple but powerful read about the children of the South Bronx. Their abandonment by local government and social institutions should not be surprising to anyone familiar with the area and the issues of national poverty in general. However, the neglect is still shocking.Kozol writes without forcefully pushing personal dogma or accusing nor blaming anyone (mostly), which makes Amazing Grace feel honest and open, allowing the reader to learn and grapple with the heart-wrenching subjects in his or her own capacity. Though it's a shame that his text is just a book and not a solution, at least it's step in a progressive direction.
    • 5/5
      It is hard to find words to express what I think about this novel. The content is not ground breaking. It is the experience of the ghetto through the eyes of a middle class white man. The experiences in this book may not seem special to those millions who experience it every day. However, for the people who live sheltered like me, this book is a powerful instrument for exposing the profound evil, the genocide perpetrated by this nation against its own people every single day.
    • 5/5
      This book should be a must-read for everyone if things are to change. The author writes movingly and powerfully about the children and their mothers of one of the poorest places in the US, Mott Haven in the Bronx of New York. The events are disturbing and the children's voices and observations are unforgettable. How can this happen? The people with enough money to help change things don't. The people with enough courage try. This book was published in 1995, but I'd guess that nothing much has changed in those areas. Now we have drugs everywhere, but it's nothing new to the Bronx. The mothers and children living there don't have the basics, and yet we as a nation allow this to continue. All of us need to educate our children differently so that these problems can be solved and the use of drugs and violence disappears. Is this possible? Of course it is, but it may take generations and we need to begin now. In the meantime, we somehow need to embrace the poorest in our nation and help them. It doesn't always involve money; sometimes an attitude is all important.
    • 3/5
      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.
    • 4/5
      A simple but powerful read about the children of the South Bronx. Their abandonment by local government and social institutions should not be surprising to anyone familiar with the area and the issues of national poverty in general. However, the neglect is still shocking.Kozol writes without forcefully pushing personal dogma or accusing nor blaming anyone (mostly), which makes Amazing Grace feel honest and open, allowing the reader to learn and grapple with the heart-wrenching subjects in his or her own capacity. Though it's a shame that his text is just a book and not a solution, at least it's step in a progressive direction.
    • 5/5
      Every comfortable American should read this book. Kozol spent more than a year walking and talking with the people living in the Bronx neighborhood of Mott Haven, some of the poorest people in the United States during the 1990s (or any era), and writes a passionate, clear-eyed and nuanced account of the pain, suffering, tragedy, profound courage and the rare triumphs of spirit to be found there. Perhaps more importantly, the book unflinching reveals the the stark injustice and callous indifference that creates and sustains the modern urban ghetto.