Stepping back from his 30-year attack on the inequalities of education, Jonathan Kozol allows the children to speak for themselves in Ordinary Resurrections. These are the schoolchildren of South Bronx's most dismal neighborhood, Mott Haven, where social struggles with poverty and imprisoned fathers rate just under AIDS and asthma as the greatest threats to young lives. Yet, Kozol marvels, despair and bitterness don't come to mind when you meet 10-year-olds like Ariel, who "skips through life" and displays a healing tenderness to others at the church afterschool program that has become a living laboratory of sorts for Kozol since he wrote Savage Inequalities in 1996. This is "not the land of bad statistics but the land of licorice sticks and long division, candy bars and pencil sets," he writes. In recording conversations between these kids and each other, their teachers, caretakers, parents, and even himself, Kozol manages to move the adults to the periphery in order to let the children teach. There is no government data, no research conclusions, only a sense of hope and wonder at the resiliency of the young.

Kozol readily admits that he's due for a reflective moment. In his 60s, living alone, his parents seriously ill, he seeks safety in surrounding himself with children. He confesses that he's not a religious man, yet he finds himself overcoming his awkwardness with prayer, even bowing his head with the children at times. His writing in this moving account is among his most eloquent, as when he describes the gentle way in which a teacher tugs for the attention of a dreamy first-grader as if carefully unwrapping a small package that may be breakable. He captures the rhythm of the exchanges between teacher and student in a way that practically whispers to the reader. Ultimately, this is a book about healing that reveals more about the lives of children in poor neighborhoods--and Kozol--than any of his prizewinning books to date. --Jodi Mailander Farrell


From Publishers Weekly
A persistent voice of conscience, Kozol poses the question: do we want our schools to remain segregated and unequal? The National Book Award-winning education activist revisits Mott Haven, a poverty-stricken section of the South Bronx that was the setting for his two previous books, Amazing Grace and Savage Inequalities. The tone here is more optimistic, partly because his extended conversations and interactions with children take place not only at public elementary schools, but also at a supportive after-school center run by St. Ann's Church, a neighborhood Episcopalian congregation that reaches out to the hungry and homeless. Ranging in age from six to 12, all of the children in Kozol's empathetic, leisurely portraits are black or Hispanic; some know hunger; many have lost at least one relative to AIDS; a large number of them see their fathers only when they visit them in prison. Many have asthma or other severe respiratory problems, which Kozol blames on the high density of garbage facilities in the area and on a waste incinerator that was not shut down until 1998 after protests by community activists, environmentalists and doctors. His sensitive profiles highlight these kids' resilience, quiet tenacity, eagerness to learn and high spirits, as well as the teachers' remarkable dedication despite sharp cutbacks in personnel and services; overcrowded, decaying buildings; and crime-riddled streets. Yet as Kozol makes piercingly clear, the students' "ordinary resurrections" can only go so far amid what he calls "apartheid education," a racially and economically segregated school system that in effect assigns disadvantaged children to constricted destinies. Major ad/promo; 11-city author tour. (May) Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From School Library Journal
YA-With warmth and compassion, Kozol tells of his continued visits with the children who attend the after-school program at St. Ann's Episcopal Church in the racially segregated, impoverished South Bronx. Surrounded by drugs and violence, these youngsters hold on to their optimism and innocence. Elio, described as "somewhat timid, almost happy, and attempting to be brave" tells him that "I can hear God crying-when I do something bad." The children listen to the author as well, sensing when he is troubled and reassuring him. The program is run by Mother Martha, an Episcopal priest educated at Radcliffe and a former trial lawyer, who doggedly works the system for her children, and by the grandmothers of the neighborhood. Kozol is well aware of what the future holds for most of these kids and rails against the injustices. However, he mostly relishes his relationship with them. Teens will be enriched and inspired by their stories, which fracture the stereotypes of the nightly news.Jane S. Drabkin, Potomac Community Library, Woodbridge, VA Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
Social critic Kozol is still writing about America's underclass of urban children and our school's failure to teach them. Unlike his classic first book, Death at an Early Age (1967), which critiqued the dysfunctional environments in which such children are forced to live, this book is a loosely organized narrative that movingly describes their inner strength and amazing resilience despite very difficult lives. Between 1997 and 1999, the author followed a handful of children attending two South Bronx public schools as well as an after-school program sponsored by an Episcopalian church. Kozol is especially supportive of the after-school program, which he feels should be studied and replicated by all public schools. The book consists of three interwoven strands: stories of the children and their interactions with teachers and families, changes in the author's personal life, and social criticism addressing such hot issues as public spending priorities, the failure of prisons (where many of the children visit their fathers), and jargon-filled educator conferences that neglect real problems. For most academic and public libraries-and required reading for future teachers.Jack Forman, San Diego Mesa Coll. Lib.Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Beliefnet
Kozol has written about the South Bronx before--in hisclassics about public education and funding inequities between city and suburban schools, "Amazing Grace" and "Savage Inequalities"-but never in such personal, moving terms. And never before has he addressed so directly the problems of faith and spiritual life among some of the poorest people in America.

Much of "Ordinary Resurrections" takes place in and around St. Ann's, an Episcopal church that runs an after-school program in the neighborhood. All of the children it serves are African-American and Hispanic (and presumably many of them don't come from Episcopalian families). The priest at St. Ann's, Mother Martha, was once a trial lawyer; she entered seminary after her brother died of AIDS in the 1980s but still retains the combative habits of the courtroom. Kozol describes her fighting building managers who try to avoid delivering needed maintenance and services to their tenants, challenging drug dealers, organizing to shut down an incinerator that was built in the neighborhood despite the incredibly high asthma rates. As she puts it, "Do the children of doctors, financiers, and publishers have to look outside their windows at trash-burners every morning?"

But the real embodiment of faith in "Ordinary Resurrections" isn't Mother Martha--it's the children themselves. Kozol, who is Jewish, describes the ease and grace with which the kids express their spiritual lives. (Beliefnet, May 2000)


From Booklist
Kozol has written about the South Bronx before, in Savage Inequalities (1991) and Amazing Grace (1996). But where those passionate screeds attacked the city of New York for the ways its schools and hospitals and public housing abuse and maltreat the children and adults of Mott Haven and other poor communities, here Kozol's focus is on the children themselves. "It's easy," he observes, "to forget how much of the existence of a seven-year-old child has to do with things that are not big at all. . . . . A narrow lens, I think, is often better than a wide one in discerning what a child's life is really like." This is Kozol's narrow lens, capturing conversations, primarily with children who attend the after-school program at St. Ann's Episcopal Church, but also with their parents and teachers, St. Ann's pastor, and the elderly neighborhood women who watch the after-school kids. This may be Kozol's most personal book: while he was celebrating the curiosity, joy, and generosity of the children of St. Ann's, he was dealing with the illnesses of his nonagenarian parents. Kozol retains his anger and contempt at the city's neglect of his small friends, but he takes a moment here to marvel at their silliness and sorrows, gentleness and bravery. Mary Carroll



"A magnificent gift to us all."



"Affecting...deeply moving. This is the most personal of Kozol's efforts."


Review
"Ordinary Resurrections is a deeply moving and marvelous book. Jonathan Kozol has shared poetic and powerful stories of the poor children of Mott Haven who became a part of his life. I pray the truth and poignancy Kozol portrays here will move you to stand up for them with your votes and your voices."
--Marian Wright Edelman, President, The Children's Defense Fund


Book Description
Jonathan Kozol's books have become touchstones of the American conscience.  In his most personal and optimistic book to date, Jonathan returns to the South Bronx to spend another four years with the children who have come to be his friends at P.S. 30 and St. Ann's.  A fascinating narrative of daily urban life seem through the eyes of children, Ordinary Resurrections gives the human face to Northern segregation and provides a stirring testimony to the courage and resilience of the young.Yet another classic of unblinking social observation from one of the finest writers ever to work in the genre, Ordinary Resurrections is a piercing discernment of right and wrong, of hope and despair -- from our nations's corridors of power to its poorest city streets.

FROM OUR EDITORS

In Ordinary Resurrections, Jonathan Kozol offers a different, more hopeful vision of life in the South Bronx than was found in his previous book, Amazing Grace. Yes, there is poverty and depravation, but in this account, Kozol views the hardscrabble district through the eyes of the children who live there, and paints an admiring portrait of the teachers, priests, parents, and grandparents who strive against all odds to ensure that these children grow up with a strong sense of pride in who they are and where they come from.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

In a stirring departure from his earlier work, Jonathan Kozol has written his most personal and hopeful book to date, an energized and unexpected answer to the bleakness of Death at an Early Age, the classic that he published more than 30 years ago." "Like his most recent book, Amazing Grace, this work also takes place in New York's South Bronx; but it is a markedly different book in mood and vantage point, because we see life this time through the eyes of children, not, as the author puts it, from the perspective of a grown-up man encumbered with a Harvard education. Here, too, we see devoted teachers in a good but underfunded public elementary school that manages, against all odds, to be a warm, inviting, and protective place; and we see the children also in the intimate religious setting of a church in which they are watched over by the vigilant grandmothers of the neighborhood and by a priest whose ministry is, first and foremost, to the very young." "A work of guarded optimism that avoids polemic and the fevered ideologies of partisan debate, Ordinary Resurrections is a book about the little miracles of stubbornly persistent innocence in children who are still unsoiled by the world and still can view their place within it without cynicism or despair." "The author's personal involvement with specific children deepens as the narrative evolves. A Jewish man, now 63 years old, he finds his own religious speculations growing interwoven with the moral and religious explorations of the children, some of whom have been his friends for nearly seven years. The children change, of course, from year to year as they learn more about the world; but the author is changed also by the generousand tender ways in which the children, step by step, unlock their secrets and unveil the mysteries of their belief to him.

SYNOPSIS

June 2000

In Ordinary Resurrections: Children in the Years of Hope, award-winning author Jonathan Kozol tells the stories of a group of children in the South Bronx whom he's known for many years and who, with joyful energy, delicious humor, and unshakable faith in their own self-worth, defy the morbid expectations of society.

In the section of the Bronx where these children live, 25 percent of children suffer asthma, 75 percent of men are unemployed, 99.8 percent of children in the public schools are black or Hispanic, and nearly 95 percent of families live on yearly incomes of $10,000 or less. Incarceration rates for men are so high that countless children see their fathers only when they visit them in prison.

Written from the vantage point of the children, Ordinary Resurrections offers a glimpse at the wanderings and dramas of these ordinary children, played out against the harsh realities of one of the most deeply segregated urban neighborhoods in the U.S.

FROM THE CRITICS

Joshua Klein - Onion AV Club

So much energy has been expended discussing and debating the plight of the inner-city poor that the lives of the poor themselves sometimes seem to fall by the wayside. After all, talking about a group of people is different from talking with a group of people, and statistics can only illustrate so much. Jonathan Kozol first sounded the wake-up call about the state of the American poor with his book Death At An Early Age, and 30 years later his quest to illuminate the plight of the disadvantaged hasn't reached its conclusion; if anything, it's intensified. In the early '90s, Kozol--a white Harvard grad and '60s activist--spent time in some of the poorest neighborhoods of the South Bronx. His experiences were detailed in Amazing Grace, but the people he encountered, specifically the children, called for a second book. Ordinary Resurrections returns Kozol to New York's forgotten underclass, but his creeping old age and the illness of his parents makes this voyage more personal. As is his habit, he lets the children he meets speak freely in their own words, listening rather than lecturing and relating what he finds to the reader. Though Kozol does have a streak of hectoring in him, for the most part his subjects--here primarily a trio of precocious first-graders named Elio, Pineapple, and Ariel--speak for him, providing an illuminating view of how these children see a world where fathers reside "upstate," shootings are commonplace, and schools struggle to stay afloat without funding. As usual for Kozol, the details he illustrates can be sad, funny, and moving, but by focusing on children, he offers a faint glimmer of hope that the next generation might right the wrongs perpetuated before them.

Gwendolyn Brooks

A magnificent gift to us all.

Marian Wright Edelman

A deeply moving and marvelous book. Jonathan Kozol has shared poetic and powerful stories of the poor children of Mott Haven who became a part of his life.

New York Times Book Review

Affecting...deeply moving. This is the most personal of Kozol's efforts.

Publishers Weekly