Fire in the Ashes: Twenty-Five Years Among the Poorest Children in America

by Jonathan Kozol

   In this powerful and culminating work about a group of inner-city children he has known for many years, Jonathan Kozol returns to the scene of his prize-winning books Rachel and Her Children and Amazing Grace, and to the children he has vividly portrayed, to share with us their fascinating journeys and unexpected victories as they grow into adulthood.

   For nearly fifty years Jonathan has pricked the conscience of his readers by laying bare the savage inequalities inflicted upon children for no reason but the accident of being born to poverty within a wealthy nation. A winner of the National Book Award, the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award, and countless other honors, he has persistently crossed the lines of class and race, first as a teacher, then as the author of tender and heart-breaking books about the children he has called “the outcasts of our nation’s ingenuity.” But Jonathan is not a distant and detached reporter. His own life has been radically transformed by the children who have trusted and befriended him.

   Never has this intimate acquaintance with his subjects been more apparent, or more stirring, than in Fire in the Ashes, as Jonathan tells the stories of young men and women who have come of age in one of the most destitute communities of the United States. Some of them never do recover from the battering they undergo in their early years, but many more battle back with fierce and, often, jubilant determination to overcome the formidable obstacles they face. As we watch these glorious children grow into the fullness of a healthy and contributive maturity, they ignite a flame of hope, not only for themselves, but for our society.
 
   The urgent issues that confront our urban schools – a devastating race-gap, a pathological regime of obsessive testing and drilling students for exams instead of giving them the rich curriculum that excites a love of learning – are interwoven through these stories. Why certain children rise above it all, graduate from high school and do well in college, while others are defeated by the time they enter adolescence, lies at the essence of this work.

   Jonathan Kozol is the author of Death at an Early Age, Savage Inequalities, and other books on children and their education. He has been called “today’s most eloquent spokesman for America’s disenfranchised.” But he believes young people speak most eloquently for themselves; and in this book, so full of the vitality and spontaneity of youth, we hear their testimony.

Genres: Nonfiction, Education, Sociology, Poverty, Social Justice, Social Issues, Politics

368 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2012

About the author

Jonathan Kozol is a non-fiction writer, educator, and activist best known for his work towards reforming American public schools. Upon graduating from Harvard, he received a Rhodes scholarship. After returning to the United States, Kozol became a teacher in the Boston Public Schools, until he was fired for teaching a Langston Hughes poem. Kozol has held two Guggenheim Fellowships, has twice been a fellow of the Rockefeller Foundation, and has also received fellowships from the Field and Ford Foundations. Most recently, Kozol has founded and is running a non-profit called Education Action. The group is dedicated to grassroots organizing of teachers across the country who wish to push back against NCLB and the most recent Supreme Court decision on desegregation, and to help create a single, excellent, unified system of American public schools.

Reviews

[Jay Connor · Rating 4 out of 5]

It takes all the way to the Epilogue to hear Kozol’s message that he has been honing through 25 years of interviews with children of urban poverty: “Charity and chance and narrow selectivity are not the way to educate the children of a genuine democracy.” I agree.

Unfortunately, this comes after of book of revisiting many children he has introduced to us over the past several decades, some with sad and fully expected derailments and others like “Pineapple” and “Jeremy” who have achieved academic breakthroughs despite coming from “neighborhoods of widespread destitution” principally because of charity and chance. By not giving his readers this message frame, this book, as his others, can reinforce a very different and debilitating message.

Jonathan Kozol has been called America’s premier chronicler of life among children of societal neglect. Though we tend to forgive Kozol’s aren’t-I-empathetic style and his I-have-a-relationship-with-these-poor-kids tone, I do believe that his style and tone have contributed to a response to his stories that is at conflict with his central hope: these kids deserve better. (Notice how many failed Colleges of Education he has been invited to address/commiserate with or in how many “post-modern,” navel-gazing Education courses his books are assigned reading).

In fact, I have seen/heard too many use Kozol as a justification that because of their circumstances, we can’t expect as much from these kids. “Developmentally Appropriate” is the guise of denying stimulation/expectation because these kids are so unfortunate. This is in the face of research that shows that these kids are more than capable of succeeding academically without do-gooder props or preference. There is a stronger relationship to their success with our (especially teachers’) expectations than with the children of poverty’s capabilities.

It doesn’t have to be the minority of Kozol’s-kids who succeed. And here is where Kozol is pitch perfect: we should not “celebrate exceptionality of opportunity,” but rather we can achieve transformative outcomes, irrespective of ethnic or economic background, for all children if we “give to every child the feast of learning that is now available to children of the poor only on the basis of careful selectivity or by catching the attention of empathetic people like the pastor of a church or another grown-up who they meet by chance.”

[Cara · Rating 5 out of 5]

Jonathan Kozol follows the lives of children he met 10-20 years ago living in homeless shelters or poor neighborhoods in New York. These stories alternate between inspirational and heartbreaking, but it's mostly just heartbreaking. It shouldn't be surprising, but children who spend their formative years hungry and homeless in poor, violent neighborhoods with terrible schools often do not turn out to be healthy, well-adjusted adults. It could easily seem exploitative to write about these children and their parents, but Jonathan Kozol has an incredible amount of compassion and respect for the people he writes about, and I get the impression that not only does he really care about them, but they in turn really care about him.

The children who do go on to "succeed" in this book are able to do so only because of luck. Luck that they were born intelligent, luck that their parents were loving, healthy, and alive, luck that some outsider cared enough about them to try to help them, luck that they managed to even make it to adulthood without being killed. This is great, and these kids should be celebrated for their hard work, because they certainly wouldn't have made it without a great deal of hard work. But hard work is not enough to help anyone without luck. What about the others?

The book is best summed up by this quote from the epilogue:

Charity and chance and narrow selectivity are not the way to educate children of a genuine democracy.

[Sera · Rating 4 out of 5]

Overall, a very interesting look on how the poor in America are unable to get a solid education. Kozol introduces us to a number of children who grew up in a part of the Bronx, NY, which is considered the poorest community in the US, and does a nice job telling their stories.

The important things that I learned from this book (in no particular order) are: (1) success is relative and needs to celebrated as such; (2) the kids who "make it" are the exception rather than the norm, and each one had someone who took an interest in them and helped them to get a better education; and (3) in many parts of the US, education remains a segregated institution where the public schools are underfunded and the children who go to these schools are being ignored.

So what do we do? The thought is to make incremental changes rather than taking on the entire issue, which is overwhelming. For example, high teacher turnover makes it difficult for children to learn. Another issue is the wasted funding for "speciality schools" that are intended to prepare children for different types of careers, say in the medical field, that don't work. The money used to fund these schools could be used to create programs to try to get more of these kids on the path to college.

All in all, this book gave me much to think about, and I give Kozol much credit in the amount of time he has spent with the kids that have been the subjects of his research. What a great person he is!

[Mikey B. · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is truly an inspirational book which confirms, that by helping one, this can radiate to many; having a long term beneficial effect for all.

We follow the lives of a few people from the Bronx in New York City. Some overcome the poverty, the poor education, and the crime and drug culture to rise up and above. We also see some, who sadly, do not make it. They are the victims of both themselves and their harsh living environment. In this predatory environment it is easy for the government to avoid improving the schools and housing, cleaning the streets of drug dealers. The people in the Bronx are marginalized by their race, their poverty and their illiteracy.

The author provides us with a view of the streets and schools of the Bronx that would be unacceptable to the wealthier denizens of Manhattan who have the means and power to improve their living standards. For instance, the affluent would never accept an unqualified teacher for their children.

But it is those who have helped to pull themselves out of the Bronx maelstrom that overwhelms me. Some of them were helped by others, such as Pastor Martha Overall who has dedicated her life to assisting and guiding a community to overcome their obstacles. Here we witness people of faith who are truly altruistic and make things happen for the better goodness of all. The people they have aided get an education, become good human beings and often return better able to aid those who are living a life of crime, drug addiction, prostitution...In the end these people become better parents and hold a job in the workplace.

This is a book about individuals struggling. There are no easy solutions. We witness all this through the telling observations of the writer over many years.

[Deb (Readerbuzz) Nance · Rating 4 out of 5]

Jonathan Kozol breaks my heart every time I open one of his books. Who knew the suffering children are experiencing in homes in the poorest areas of our country? Who knew how schools, the last hope of many, are giving up on these children? Who knew?

Kozol revisits children he has run across in his work in the schools in the past forty years. For many of these children, life has only gotten more difficult and many of these stories end tragically, with prison time and even in death.

But there are happy stories, too. As I was reading along, with one devastating story after the other, I was at the point, mid-book, where it was too painful to go on. It was almost as if Kozol realized that, too, and the stories suddenly began to shift and Kozol began to tell the stories of lives redeemed and saved along with the bleak.

A book that is a reminder to all of us of the power we hold in our hands to help or hinder those too weak or too tired to make it on their own.

[Melanie Page · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've read a selection from Kozol's book The Shame of the Nation in an ENGL 101 anthology from which I teach. It's a powerful excerpt, so I figured that since I've been tasked with teaching a new class fall 2016, ENGL 100, I would do a couple of non-fiction journalism/essay-type books to get my students reading more and engaged with big topics.

Fire in the Ashes was the best book I found to really jump into Kozol's work. It covers from 1985 to 2012. Kozol follows and does his best to keep in contact with families that often started in what sounds like the world's worst building, located across the street from Macy's and a block over from 5th Ave in New York City. To my knowledge, homeless families were stuck in these buildings that were owned by the most awful of slumlords, who would encourage women to have sex with the guards (or him) for protection. Children missed school, were exposed to drugs, were robbed or shot at, and played in garbage.

Most families were then placed in homes in the Bronx, where things were no better. The first section of Kozol's book describes families with a child who did not make it -- stories that ended in death. Just when you think the whole book is going to cripple your nerves from guilt and shame and sorrow, section two tells the stories of children who did become successful.

Fire in the Ashes humanizes the homeless and the poverty and laughable excuse for schools that people endured after they were placed in permanent homes. One story that touched me in particular was when a woman described how she would know when she was happy again:

"I pray," she said, "for something that I haven't done in thirteen years."

[Kozol] asked her what it was.

"To pick up my knitting needles," she replied.

A soft smile lighted up her eyes. "I used to make a sweater in three weeks if I had nothin' to upset me. I'd start when it was summertime and I'd have six sweaters made for Christmas . . . If you ever see me get my needles out again, you'll know I'm feelin' happy."

Another story that stood out was of a man named Pietro who recognized the squalor of the building in which the homeless were stashed. It cost so little to have that he kept a duck in the room in which he and his children lived.

"I know," he said, "it seems a little crazy for us to keep a duck in the apartment. But the children love him, and the neighborhood is so depressing and they have so little. I just want them to remember that they're children. . . ."

Pietro works hard to keep in contact with Kozol. The author loses track of many families and individuals because it is common for the homeless or those living in extreme poverty, like the families he grew to know, to move frequently or have their phones turned off. Therefore, it's on the part of the individuals to keep in contact with Kozol. Pietro was one of those people. Kozol describes how Pietro's letters "began, typically, on a long and crowded page, would continue on another page if he had another piece of paper, and then on smaller scraps of paper or the backs of envelopes or whatever other bits of paper he might have." It really hit me: though I'd read about the bullets and gangs and drugs and rape and children being robbed for their food at knife point, it was when Pietro never had more than 1-2 pieces of paper that I realized just how poor poor can get (most likely because I relate to paper and can't fathom the rampant violence).

Fire in the Ashes was the perfect read to follow Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed. While Ehrenreich mentions housing issues and her co-workers struggling to keep their families together, I didn't get the full feel of it. Kozol fills in this other part of the working poors' lives, and together, the experience was hard-hitting. I'm pretty excited to teach both books this coming fall!

[Barbara · Rating 4 out of 5]

I often like to read the books written by social activists Jonathan Kozol at the start of a new school year--partly for inspiration, partly to remind me why I am so dedicated to the teaching profession, and partly to marvel at how lucky I have been. This book has been waiting on one of my side tables for several months now. I don't know what kept me from reading it--maybe fear that he'd return to the children to which he had introduced his readers in earlier books and find that there were few success stories, maybe because I had a lot of other material to read. But I'm glad I finally got around to this book, the title of which should have reminded me that there is hope. While many of the stories he shares do not have happy endings, and prompt anger at a system that seems to have little regard for the poor while also evoking sadness over some of the choices made by children and their parents, he also tells stories that describe how some of the children living in the Bronx made it through college, and how some of their successes in all other ways--some being successful simply through surviving and managing to retain their human-ness and their kindness. Throughout each story there are common themes involving family and the nurturing of other adults, the disparity among schools and educational experiences, the grindingly bleak daily existence that must be eked out when one's home or living conditions offer no sanctuary. Over and over, on every page in this book, in every book that he writes, Kozol reminds his readers that something must change. While I closed the book with feelings of hope that each of us can make small changes, I also wondered at the size of the task that lies ahead and how so many incompetent teachers can be allowed to fill school buildings and so many politicians or slumlords be allowed to do as they please. When and how will this change? Although Kozol lovingly describes many of his interactions with the families he met decades ago and still knows, I wonder what the cost to him has been. As he always does, he has left me with questions and a need to search my own heart about these issues.

[Louise · Rating 4 out of 5]

In this book you see the tremendous amount of caring, cost and nurturing it takes to help a child who has lived in and around trauma acquire the skills to leave poverty behind. The children profiled in this book have seen family members and neighbors die through violence, drugs and suicide. They have been hungry and bullied by others suffering the same social conditions. They have loyalty to family, guilt for having opportunities. Some waver between confidence and doubt. I would imagine their lives are more lonely than they let on.

Each of these is a story of hope, but each of these is an exception. How many scholarships to boarding schools are there? How many homes are there like Marta's that have the patience to endure betrayals of a child in need like Benjamin?

There was a time when a Kozol book was a best seller upon publication. There was once more interest in the education of poor children; there was concern about the plight of the poor in general. Today, not so much. Those who once had the shelter of "Welfare Hotels" are now homeless and very little political or press time is devoted to their plight.

Jonathan Kozol and Robert Coles have spent their lives helping children in need. Their direct help to children has been supplemented by their books which have inspired others to take on this challenge. Kozol and Coles won't be with us forever. I hope some young people, perhaps some such as those covered in this book, will rise to carry the torch of this mission and bring more attention the needs of poor children.

[Sally · Rating 4 out of 5]

The author looks back on several of the children and adults he has known for many years in the South Bronx, people who are usually denigrated or demonized when not ignored entirely. His gift, as always, is in making plain the full humanity and worth of marginalized people, people who have become his friends but whom he never sentimentalizes. In many ways it is a meditation on what allows some children to escape their poverty-stricken, violent neighborhood, while others self-destruct even when given opportunities. In this sample, the young men seem more inwardly fragile and less able to recover from psychological damage and a toxic environment than the young women, more apt to retreat into a hardened self-centeredness devoid of empathy even for their families and/or a cycle of self-destructiveness. Black, brown, and white boys are examples in this category; race is not the issue. The bottom line, however, is: no one gets out without intervention and a lot of help from people who don't live in the neighborhood, whether teachers, pastors, or people involved in charities. And even with help and positive family realtionships, the children are so far behind academically by the time they finish elementary school (let alone the higher grades) and so psychologically effected by their surroundings that they must really struggle to succeed no matter how bright and determined they are. The larger point is that none of the children in that neighborhood or any other deserve to live under such conditions.

[Toni · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm something of a sociology buff. I enjoy hearing about other people's lives, journeys, struggles, etc., without being bombarded with statistics and studies. Jonathan Kozol is a great chronicler of the lives of impoverished children as evidenced in his bestselling book, Savage Inequalities.

Kozol spent time in a neighborhood in the Bronx, known to be one of the poorest urban areas in the country. He came to know several families, most who were relocated there after the closing of several "hotels" that housed the homeless in Manhattan. He tells their stories while also educating us on the cultural, social, economic, and political reasons behind the circumstances they find themselves in. Yes, these mainly Black and Latino children have been "left behind" by most of society, there are some happy endings. A couple are able to escape geographically. A few are able to escape educationally.

The best thing about Kozol's books is that he isn't just an impartial observer. He does his best to help those who need and want it and has even set up a foundation to help the families in his books. I recommend Fire In The Ashes to anyone with an interest in education and the plight of poor children in this country.

[Valentina · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a fascinating account of disfranchised kids living in one of the poorest neighborhoods in the United States. It is a heartbreaking and eye-opening view of the lives that are affected by the lack of care the government provides them.
The author first met most of these children twenty-five years ago, and he begins his accounts at the moment of the first meeting, continuing on until adulthood. He focuses first on the children who weren’t able to succeed, to get past the deficiencies they had to put up with as they grew: horrific government housing, being placed in neighborhoods which are full of violence and drugs, and deplorable schools who sometimes didn’t even have textbooks for all their classes. This book throws a light on all these things that we might otherwise not know about, because it is not necessarily public knowledge. His writing is clear, straight to the point, but full of heart. We can tell how much he cares for these children who he’s followed for twenty-five years.
This is definitely a book to read. Many parts are tough to get through because of the topic. It can be harsh sometimes, thinking of children living in these conditions, but it has to be read. If we don’t know the truth, then there’s no hope of it every changing.

[Matt · Rating 5 out of 5]

Americans love the idea of people born in humble circumstances pulling themselves up through hard work and tyranny of will. I give Fire in the Ashes five stars because, more than anything else I've read, it gave me a sense of just how much has to go right in the lives of the very poor for them to pull it off. Kozol shares a handful of vignettes on the lives of kids he worked with who grew up in a poor neighborhood in New York and managed to elevate their personal circumstances. Throughout the narrative you meet siblings or friends who weren't so fortunate. Our society has done a good job of creating the conditions required to make this kind of storyline possible (i.e. the poverty), but not such a good job of creating the conditions for making these stories probable. In almost all of the stories, these kids succeeded because of the personal intervention of someone who was engaged in the kids' lives who weren't getting paid for it.

[Edward Sullivan · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book will be most appreciated by readers familiar with Kozol's other works, particularly titles relating to the children and families he has come to know at St. Ann's. Twenty-five years after beginning to follow the lives of these impoverished children, the author offers updated findings. He concludes that the children who have done well as adults have had something special: someone who intervened in their lives. Powerful and moving.

[Dolly · Rating 4 out of 5]

This story chronicles the lives of those families who lived in poverty in or near the Martinique, a building in the South area of the Bronx borough in New York City. It was a former hotel, once heralded for its splendor and design, but later used by the city as a short-term shelter for families on public aid.

The squalor of the hotel and the dangers of lead paint and other toxic pollutants that families were exposed to were horrific. And if that weren't bad enough the gangs, drug dealers, and other criminal threats around every corner were sure to put children at a high risk for dropping out of school, becoming incarcerated, or even for being killed.

During a period of time in the 1980s and 90s, the author met with different families during their stay there or during their visits to a local church, St. Ann's. The author worked with other dedicated people and organizations to try to make a difference in the lives of the families with whom he maintained contact.

He got to know of them, sometimes gave them money from his foundation, put them in touch with other organizations which could help them, and followed the paths their lives led over the course of the next decades.

Some of the stories are inspiring, some are humorous, but many are heartbreaking. I may not have come from a wealthy background, but the opportunities and 'white privilege' that I have taken for granted all of my life would likely have made a huge difference in the lives of the children in this book as well. But most of the people in this book suffered from the blatant discrimination, lack of resources and trained educators, and political disinterest that people in this socioeconomic strata experience, even today.

interesting quotes (page numbers from paperback edition with ISBN13 978-1400052479):

"I cited Mario Cuomo, the former New York governor, who came away with horror from a visit to the Martinique, and likened it to 'a scene out of Dickens.'" (p. 63)

"I find I like to talk with her as often as I can. It feels to me as if I'm standing with her on a very solid piece of ground, after a tornado's passed. Strength, it seems, in somebody who had a lot of courage to begin with, can, at last, renew itself." (p. 106)

"The organized abuse of women in the building, she believed, would have made front page headlines in the press, if those who were the victims were not overwhelmingly Black and Latino" (p. 110)

"Alice was a good 'decoder' of the words and subtle biases and innuendos in news stories. It was she who pointed out to me, for instance, that the papers were referring to the presence of so many homeless people in this section of Manhattan as essentially a sanitation problem. Plumbing imagery was being used in speaking of a 'backup' in the homeless population, which had caused the 'overflow' to spill in to the old hotels around Times Square." (p. 110)

"She empathized with those who were true victims but, in her own case, she rejected victimhood. The details of life and the amusement that she took in dwelling on those details, toying with those details, were her weaponry of choice against the many difficulties that she had to face. New York was a bitter place for women of her class and color in those days, but she did not reciprocate that bitterness. She rose above the meanness that surrounded her. She punched holes in that meanness with her cleverness and wit and with her eye for the preposterous. She laughed a lot. She loved her lamb chops and her baked potato. In the details, she transcended." (p. 139)

"Hearing the indignation in her voice, I was reminded of other students I had known, black and Latino students mostly, but conscientious young white people, too, who became so wrathful or seemed to be so overwhelmed by the sheer dimensions of the problems they perceived that they tended to give up on many good and useful things that could have done right here and now within the social system as it stands. I recalled a piece of practical advice, an helpful exhortation I'd heard from someone older than myself some years before: Look for battles big enough to matter, but at the same time, small enough to win some realistic victories." (p. 204)

"'He has a gift for giving comfort to these people. Some of them are elderly,' she said. 'Sometimes he does this on his own, going back to talk with them or read to them or pray with them or simply bring whatever peace and kindness he can into their final days. It's not perfunctory for Jeremy; it comes right from his heart and soul. I know that they look forward to his visits." (p. 255)

"'You know,' he said. 'I still have that feeling about teaching. It hasn't gone away. But maybe, there are other ways of teaching than the one that takes place in a school.'" (p. 256)

"And he said: A goal should not be seen as something separate from the journey that a person takes to get there. Not the place, but the path. Not the goal, but the way. That's how I remember it. I still believe the journey is ahead of me." (p. 258)

"The principal listened to him carefully. When he was finished, the principal, who was an Hispanic man and told us he had grown up in New York, talked to Angelo about his own unhappy years while he was in secondary school. He told him that he had been a high school dropout and that it was several years before he found the motivation to return to school. When he got to college, he resolved to find a way to be of help to other kids who were going through the kinds of troubles he himself had known. 'This,' he said, 'was why he had decided to become a teacher. Later,' he explained to Angelo, 'he received a graduate degree that qualified him to become a principal.'" (p. 267)

"The years in middle school for too many children in the Bronx, as in other troubled sections of New York, have proven to be killing fields in academic terms, as well as psychologically and socially. Thousands of students in other cities, too, even when their elementary schooling has been relatively good, come out of their middle schools and go on to high school with severe impairment of their basic skills. Whatever assets they've acquired in the elementary years seem to be transmuted into deficits by the time they enter the ninth grade." (p. 268)

"But success, an arbitrary term at best, takes a wide variety of forms, some of which do not glow so visibly. Angelo did not have the opportunities that Jeremy and Pineapple received. He never had the conversational exposure to history, to books, to questions about ethics and to challenging ideas that Jeremy was given by the pastor and the poet and his other mentors. Nor did he have the very strong parental backing that Pineapple knew she could depend on. His father, it will be recalled, had been in prison from the time when Angelo was born. His mother, kindly woman that she is, did not have the temperament or determination to oversee his education and could not help him to control the furious defensiveness that erupted in him in his adolescent years. But seven sessions in the Tombs and four months at Riker's Island have not destroyed the qualities of decency and earnestness and persistent innocence, that 'real light in his eyes' that Mr. Rogers noted when he took the photograph of Angelo that now hangs here on my wall. He isn't slick, he isn't glib, he isn't cruel, he isn't mean. He's a kind and loving human being, which is not the case with many of the more sophisticated people that I know, that have been to college or have multiple degrees. To me, those qualities of elemental goodness in his soul matter more than anything." (p. 282)

"If any lesson may be learned from the academic breakthroughs achieved by Pineapple and Jeremy, it is not that we should celebrate exceptionality of opportunity but that the public schools themselves in neighborhoods of widespread destitution ought to have the rich resources, small classes, and well-prepared and well-rewarded teachers that would enable us to give to every child the feast of learning that is now available to children of the poor only on the basis of a careful selectivity or by catching the attention of empathetic people like the pastor of a church or another grown-up whom they meet by chance. Charity and chance and narrow selectivity are not the way to educate children of a genuine democracy." (p. 304)

[Holly Morrow]

Jonathan Kozol is an activist on issues surrounding poverty and education in urban America. I first heard of him because my best friend joined Teach for America after being inspired by his book Savage Inequalities. I have not read his earlier books (there are 5 I believe), but think they were more focused on issues surrounding public education – data, policy, etc. This book is more personal; almost a retrospective – he looks back on families he has written about and spent time with over many years and talks about how the children have fared. A number of these families he met when they were in an infamous hotel-turned-homeless-shelter called the Martinique in Manhattan – a Lord of the Flies kind of place which might be the worst possible situation in which to raise children (a girl raped in the stairwell, addicts shooting up in the hallway). New York City finally shut the Martinique down, and moved the families to housing projects, mostly in the South Bronx. Kozol follows these families as they make the transition and as the parents struggle to keep their heads above water and shield their children from the influences around them. Single mothers, fathers, and married couples who are trying to do what all parents want to do – raise healthy, happy, contributing adults. The fact that he chooses families headed by relatively high-functioning adults actually makes the stories even more heartbreaking – because even with effort and good intention, the obstacles in front of these children are almost insurmountable, and many of them don’t make it. Many come from bad family situations (e.g. a father in prison); are “educated” in chaotic, failing schools; violence and chronic stresses are everpresent in their peripheral view even if theyre not directly involved; there are virtually no legitimate employment opportunities in their neighborhoods; and a plethora of seductive bad examples beckon them. While Kozol is not preachy (if anything his tone is avuncular), he has occasional flashes of anger not only at the injustice that children are born into these circumstances by no fault of their own, but also that if they fail to overcome them, they are often blamed for it and called lazy, stupid, bad. How do you really say that children who grow up in these circumstances have the same opportunity as, say, me? Ive worked hard in my life, but for me as a young person succeeding meant not pissing away the opportunities that were laid before me (many of which I did!); staying on the right path was a fairly passive endeavor, allowing the current to move me downstream. Succeeding for these kids means constantly, constantly fighting upstream. I can't say its an uplifting read (although Kozol describes many local heroes – a pastor, great teachers, and other mentors), but it’s a good antidote to the stupid, ruthless Ayn Randism that pretends that we all line up equally equipped at the same starting line and its only character and work ethic that determines who wins the race.

[Karen · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've been wanting to read Kozol for a long time, but was intimidated for some reason...I think I thought Savage Inequalities might be a dense, academic, footnote-ridden tome that would improve me but not be too enjoyable in the reading. I grabbed Fire in the Ashes as an ARC at ALA last summer, and just pulled it off my shelf in between novels. It's a slightly odd place to start reading Kozol, since it's a retrospective on his lifetime of work and the relationships he's developed over the course of it--but it's anything but dry and dense.

Kozol comes across in his writing as a deeply thoughtful and sensitive person, someone who sees misery and injustice and doesn't turn away. That's a rare enough trait--but he's also spent his life trying to do something to improve the lives of people he sees suffering, and to change the larger systems that create the conditions of their unhappiness. His Wikipedia article really sums it up. He's a really remarkable person.

In this book, it's also clear that Kozol has shared his own life with the people whose lives he describes--that they know about his own family troubles and worries, and that he sees them socially and enjoys their company. Kozol comes across less as a researcher and more as a community minister, minus the actual religious infrastructure. Which is an awkward way of saying that he shares human relationships with the people he writes about, and that he engages in their lives and tries to help them--and accepts their advice and generosity when they offer it to him in return.

Kozol's writing is relatively formal but never austere. He's scrupulously fair in reporting both the ways that politics and economy unfairly burden poor people, and also the times when they bear some responsibility for their situation. He's compassionate and insightful, but never sentimental or apologistic.

Is this a hopeful book? I'm not sure. Certainly Kozol doesn't finish up by saying that the problems of inner-city poverty and institutionalized racism are all wrapped up. He seems to struggle with a appropriate ending for the book, given that he tells stories of people who have both pulled themselves out of poverty and those who have sunk under its weight. In the end, he lets one of his subjects speak for herself, in her own energetic and optimistic voice.

[Kelly Robinson · Rating 4 out of 5]

I first read Kozol’s work Amazing Grace as a college prerequisite. Amazingly, despite much consternation over having to read something so depressing over summer break, I came to see the importance of his heartbreaking chronicles of the poor and disenfranchised living in the South Bronx. While Savage Inequalities remains my favorite Kozol work, one which prompted me to a career in education, I never stopped wondering about the people in Mott Haven that I learned about in Kozol’s Amazing Grace. Now, 15 years later Kozol has given the reader an update about some of the families from Mott Haven in Fire in the Ashes. Kozol doesn’t sugar coat anything – he chronicles a reality where people are living in extreme poverty and at least 75 percent of young African American men do not graduate from high school. Although the majority of people he chronicles did not overcome the tremendous obstacles against them, Kozol offers a glimmer of hope in that several children who received help from outside forces did survive, and triumph.

For anyone interested in education, human interest, and a little discussed part of America, I highly recommend Fire in the Ashes. Just be prepared for a book that does exact a lot of emotion - anger, sadness, and even elation. Even if you have not read Kozol’s earlier works (which I recommend you do if you enjoy this book) Kozol does a fantastic job of giving the back-story behind the families he chronicles. I also find that even though many of this book's themes - poverty, education, and violence - are issues easily politicized, Kozol really leaves the decisions as to what needs to occur to help solve these problems up to the reader. Kozol does present his own view that vast systematic changes are needed to help those he chronicles, but really does not present a definitive political agenda, which I feel makes his books more introspective and gives them wider appeal.

[Kelly Hager · Rating 5 out of 5]

I first read Jonathan Kozol when I was in college. I minored in sociology and in one of my classes, we read his book Savage Inequalities, which is about the worst school systems in the country. I don't necessarily mean "worst" in terms of students there or teachers and staff. These schools were basically in the poorest sections of various towns. The one that stuck with me in the almost 10 years since I took the class is the one where the roof was in such bad shape that there would be a waterfall when it rained. A literal waterfall, not a few leaks.

This book is basically a followup to two earlier books (Rachel and Her Children and Amazing Grace) and shows what's happened to some of the children in those books.

(Note: you don't need to have read those books to read this one---he discusses backstory for each child featured.) Some of the children have gone on to college and are leading productive lives. And some are dead.

This book broke my heart and made me furious. We have this belief in this country---some of us, anyway---where poor people are poor because they deserve to be---because they don't wark hard, for example, or (related) because they'd rather be on welfare and have babies than work or because they didn't go to college and so can only have a few career options (generally low-paying ones).

But here's the thing: if you are born into a family with poor parents, it is so much harder for you to get out of that cycle of poverty. It's harder to attend a good school, which makes it harder to get into a good college (if you can even afford to go), which makes it harder to get a good job.

And then all you hear is that your life is your fault, generally espoused by people who say that they worked hard to get where they are, but who have a billion advantages that you don't have.

Highly recommended.

[Jenny GB · Rating 3 out of 5]

Jonathan Kozol takes a look back at the lives of children he has known for years that either successfully pulled themselves out of the hardships surrounding them or succumbed to the forces beyond their control. He provides commentary on people who just could not shake the addictions, anger, and depressions of their life of poverty and failed to overcome it. For some reason, he noted that women have more resilience than men although he doesn't offer an explanation of why. Then he shares the happy successes of many of the more famous children from his previous books. He emphasizes that their success was not possible without the support of people inside or outside the community that were committed to providing these people with a great education and taking them away from their war zone of a neighborhood. They required many years of patience and, in more cases, superior education. Also, the children that were successful were clearly motivated internally to achieve their goals. Not only education, but also strong ties to family sometimes brought about the resurrection from their unsavory pasts.

It was a great idea to follow some students all the way through their childhood and into adulthood to show the full scope of the tragedy that poverty and poor schooling wrecks on some lives, while at the same time giving some hints as to ways that some students overcame it. Hearing the children mature and share their own words and dreams was quite inspirational, but it also inflicts a sense of guilt for all the other students that could have become this if they were only given the opportunity to grow and learn. Kozol, as always, write with conviction and sympathy. You can tell that he loves the people he speaks about in his books and he is a powerful advocate for them. I cannot imagine educational literature in these times without his voice.

[Dan Schiff · Rating 4 out of 5]

Another reviewer picked up on the same passage near the end of the book that I wanted to highlight: "Charity and chance and narrow selectivity are not the way to educate the children of a genuine democracy."

Anyone who would dare to paint the poorest Americans with a broad brush -- as lulled into complacency and laziness by the welfare system, for example -- needs to read Kozol's books. There are children in Fire in the Ashes who make it out of the South Bronx and go to college, and there are other children in the book who don't make it out of their teens. Many of them benefit from Kozol's intervention in their lives, while others ultimately do not.

One of the most affecting accounts concerns a family given the opportunity to leave New York and move to a small town in Montana, thanks to the generosity of a church congregation. It's a scenario that Kozol says reeks of paternalism to some, but initially it seems to work. However, two of the three family members were already set on a course of self-destruction that no change of scenery, and perhaps nothing, could have prevented. Kozol's implicit message is, whether or not these people are victims of their own personal weaknesses, in an environment of extreme poverty, crime, violence and crumbling schools, lives have little room for error. And when a child is exposed to conditions of despair from an early age, there may be no reversing that damage.

Kozol is not an especially efficient writer and his prose is often clumsy. But the substance of his words matters most, and he knows his job is merely to serve as a conduit for the voices of his subjects. Kozol's selflessness and patience with these people, marginalized by a society obsessed with the "middle class", is a service to all of us.

[Andrew · Rating 4 out of 5]

A One-Minute Review
“Twenty-five years among the poorest children in America” is the subtitle and excellent description of Fire in the Ashes, an exposé about America’s impoverished children by writer and activist Jonathan Kozol. After a lifetime of working with children from America’s poorest neighbourhoods, Kozol returns to New York City to reconnect with those he met years ago. The haven of St. Ann’s Episcopal Church and The Martinique, an infamous welfare hotel, are the geographic poles around which many of these lives revolve. Between these places, Kozol tells stories of children who made it and children who didn’t; of families that survived and families that cracked; of children like Pineapple and Silvio growing up in the poorest districts of the world’s richest nation. Kozol’s writing reveals to the reader the intertwined dignity and desperation that describe the survival of children who both break your heart and rekindle hope. In a year where the passionate investigative writing of Katherine Boo’s Behind the Beautiful Forevers and Blaine Harden’s Escape from Camp 14 highlighted poverty abroad, Fire in the Ashes reminds us that it exists at home in equal measure.

[WTF Are You Reading? · Rating 5 out of 5]

The growing under-class of disenfranchised poor has long been a hidden bruise on the face of America of which few have dared to speak. Fire In the Ashes dares not only to give voice to a few such people, but to allow an entire generation to tell its stories.

This book is a look into the long term effects of poverty, neglect, and social ambivalence on a people, and the ways in which they have overcome or been overcome by their circumstances.

When reading this book it becomes glaringly apparent that though the stories found here are heartbreaking and often tragic, the people are not. They are prime examples of spirits which fight with all that they have not to be broken. They want better for themselves, their children, their community, and the world at large.
They do not tell their stories to garner pity or charity from the audience; they simply are trying to be heard, not as a sound bite on the local news, but as people, strong, dignified, indomitable, and deserving of greatness.

WTF Are You Reading? For reviews, giveaways and more...

[Linda · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book made me angry and yet sad at the same time. I feel like we are leaving whole segments of our country behind and it feels as though we are doing it deliberately. These people don't matter because they are brown and black or ethnic and are not somehow deserving of the same benefits as the whites that live in areas just around the corner from the areas the children in this book lived. The schools are awful, the housing substandard and yet HUD does nothing. Society looks down on people who live in these so called "ghettos" but does everything it can to make sure people who are born there have no chance at all to get out and make something of themselves.

When you treat people like shit,surround them with shit,toxins and violence and do everything in your power to keep them down how to you expect them to achieve even the smallest things. How do you expect them to hold their heads up with pride about who they are and where they come from.

I admire Jonathan Kozol for telling these stories and letting people know these children are out there.

[Ashley Szofer · Rating 5 out of 5]

Jonathan Kozol is the inspiration behind many of my career aspirations. Because of deep, sensitive work like his, I find it impossible to turn a blind eye to the injustices in place for those who weren't as fortunate as I was in terms of the birth lottery. I could not put this book down and find myself just truly rooting for the people that Kozol has come to be so close with and feel more driven than ever to make a difference for the young individuals in our nation who deserve a fighting chance at success in what we call the land of opportunity. I cannot wait to pursue graduate work in the field of education policy and to get started on making a difference. Every little bit helps and because of it, everyone should have to read the works that Kozol has so thoughtfully shared with us. We owe it to our country and ourselves to open our eyes to what life is really like for the people so often judged as just "lazy" or "bad parents".

[Peggy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Why are academics liberal? Maybe because we read books like this. I dare anyone to read it and walk away thinking that children from neighborhoods like the one described here in the South Bronx just need to try harder to succeed at school and enter the U.S. economy seamlessly. I'd like to add that my jaw dropped at the description of the Rev. Martha Overall, Episcopal priest at St. Anne's, whose generosity, ferocity, attention, and love provided one of the few bright spots in the lives of many of these children. All of America should love and honor these vulnerable children and provide them with the safety and security that we imagine all children to have. So thanks, Jonathan Kozol, for reminding me what the world is really like.

[Courtney · Rating 4 out of 5]

Took me awhile to get through but well worth the read especially working in education. While we have some low income schools in my district I don't think we know poverty like this. We also have pretty high quality public education. You get to follow the lives of a few select kids over their educational journeys. It's not heartbreaking the obstacles they have to overcome and also inspiring when some break through. The narrator is like a godparent to these kids. Well done!

[Marcia · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very interesting and eye opening read. It offers a peak into the lives of poor urban families and how it impacts the children coming from the projects. My biggest critique is that Kozol only offers these stories, without giving suggestions for the solution to the problem of getting poor children through the system successfully.

[Mitzi Moore · Rating 3 out of 5]

Kozol writes true stories of friends he made in the inner city. I admire his ability to keep in touch with people over the decades (without, apparently, the ease of Facebook). The way schools have failed these children, and the sad result, make me even more committed to my work as a public school teacher. Not all the stories are sad. Some have truly happy endings.

[Louise · Rating 4 out of 5]

Kozol's writing is at once humane, kind, and funny. He offers no solutions to systemic social problems, but he cares and writes beautifully of many kids he has known from their childhood in the 90's till now. As Tavis Smiley and Cornell West have said as they travel the country drawing attention to poverty- what we have now is not a War on Poverty but a War on Poor People.

[Laney · Rating 3 out of 5]

Once again, I can't believe I was enjoying my happy little oblivious childhood in the 1980's when all this awfulness was going down at the Martinique / the Bronx. This book was definitely educational, eye opening, and depressing. I'm glad I read it, but I can't say it was a total page-turner that sucked me in and kept my interest the entire time. Some stories were more interesting than others.