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

In this fine book, Jonathan Kozol revisits children whose lives he has been involved with for many years. All have some connection to St. Ann's church in the Bronx and the services offered there. Kozol has written extensively about these children over the years, and been very involved in their lives. This book tells the next step of their stories.

In some ways, this is a wondefully hopeful book. Several of the children have finished college, others are living meaningful and service-oriented lives. Many have children of their own, and are good parents. However, in other ways, the book can lead to despair, in thinking of all these children had to endure in their lives, and when you think about the fact that their neighborhood is still full of failing schools and that America still seems to care little for its poor.

The main message here, as Kozol points out, is that the children that succeeded, although credit must be given to all of them for being extraordinary people, had help. They met someone at a crucial point in their life that gave them a leg up, a ear to listen to, help getting into the right school. Some of them had families that went above and beyond to do all they could to help them succeed. But none of them succeeded in a vacuum. We all need to take responsibility to help where we can, either within our own families or by helping the greater community. The cost of not doing this is high---prison, drug addiction, death.

I thank Jonathan Kozol for his life of caring.

Before reading this book I had never heard of Jonathan Kozol and therefore am not really all that familiar with his work and the people with whom he has worked. Still, "Fire in the Ashes" managed to be an interesting read that rather had me itching to get back into the world of education.

Each chapter focuses on a particular child, and Kozol gives an account of that child's development or lack thereof over the years. The first few chapters are not the happiest, but serves as a decent comparision for the second portion of the book in which the success stories are presented.

The accounts are quite thorough and provided enlightening summaries of these kids' lives to the present--though Kozol's attention to detail and conversation somehow left everything, in my view, surprisingly impersonal. I do believe it would be unprofessional to create a work dedicated to tugging at heartstrings and tear ducts, but I still feel this is the type of book that should get me caring about the individuals. I did find myself much more educated and concerned about the situations of inner-city kids and their schools, but I failed to connect with anyone presented. A big part of me commends Kozol's just-the-facts approach with its scattered events and conversations, but it did leave me feeling rather neutral on the individuals.

This, however, does not take away from the enlightening importance of this book as it works to open eyes to unforunate situations. One may or may not agree with Kozol's politics and social views (which I feel he keeps respectfully in the background) but the book does lay out the undeniable situation at hand.

Personal taste is what fuels my recommendations here. Kozol presents the book and its people without any fanfare and some readers might want more of a conclusion and a point. But for those who just want the honest situation, this will be much appreciated.

This book should make any reader angry and frustrated toward the criminally-negligent "public education" system that has basically failed/is failing inner city children for decades.

One problem is that it preaches to the converted - I was already impotently angry, and now I'm a little angrier and more cynical, but it seems like the people who could effect some change never bother to read accounts like this, or try to empathize with the situation at all.

To give some comparison - Post Traumatic Stress is legitimately in the news because of so many soldiers affected after 11 years of war and many multiple year-long deployments. The children - the CHILDREN - that Kozol writes about are growing up for their entire lives in hellish, crime-ridden environments not too far removed from war zones, and somehow they are expected to go to school and pass some absurd standardized test that's supposed to prove something. What they experience is the definition of PTSD - minus the "post" part - and it's happening when they're 7,8,9 years old, right through their teenage years.

It's a grotesque obscenity. Really, we shouldn't take ourselves seriously as a country when we sit on our hands and let this happen.

Kozol helps out a lot of the kids he met and wrote about - he quotes emails where they thank him for laptops that he helped provide them. He's doing the right thing - as he points out in an endnote, these children gave him a lot of their time, and they deserve compensation. But, this does feed into America's "winning the lottery" culture. Because these specific children were lucky enough to meet and engage Kozol, they're the ones with laptops, and inroads to better schools and opportunities. The children Kozol did not meet, or didn't connect with, are left to their enviornment. That's not Kozol's fault, but that's how it is.

This kind of individual charity/support is important, but the book reminds me that it will never solve the larger problem. We're all happy that a rich benefactor can drop from the sky with gifts and money, but we all complain whenever someone suggests paying an extra nickel in taxes that - properly spent - could effect some positive change in the entire system. Lottery winnings are spent and then they're gone; systemic change requires a long-term institutional committment that we are apparently unwilling to invest in.

The book is broken into chapters that read more like short stories than a connected narrative. He opens with the stories with unhappy endings, and closes with children that turned out pretty well. Despite the subject matter, it was dry at times, and his very businesslike writing style does a good job at keeping unnecessary melodrama to a minimum, though sometimes at the expense of clear passion. However - that means a reader will never pity the children, but can try to empathize, and that's vital to the book's success.

I had not read Kozol's previous books, where he first introduced many of this book's "characters" (I incorrectly thought he wrote There Are No Children Here: The Story of Two Boys Growing Up in The Other America, which I read years ago), but he provided enough background that I don't feel that was necessary. This book led me to do more research on the ghastly Martinique Hotel, which Kozol explored in Rachel and Her Children: Homeless Families in America; it might have been totally renovated since the 1990s but there's not enough money in the world that would get me to spend a night there.

So this was powerful and depressing...uplifting, but often only on an individual level. It provides little hope for the rotten system these kids have to live in - though there are small victories, and some smaller schools within these communities that are effectively helping some children. Still, for every soldier - and I'm a war veteran - suffering PTSD, there's probably dozens or hundreds of American children who go to school in awful situations and we barely pay any mind at all. It's a crime.