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

Publishers WeeklyNational Book Award–winner Kozol (The Shame of the Nation) again traces the workings of "savage inequalities"—this time on a generational timescale—in this engrossing chronicle of lives blighted and redeemed. He follows the fortunes of people he met decades ago in a squalid Manhattan welfare hotel and in the South Bronx's Mott Haven ghetto, whose stories range from heartbreaking to hopeful: traumatized boys grow into lost and vicious men; teens go to college and beyond with the help of mentors; many drift through years of addiction, violent relationships, and prison before achieving a semblance of stability and focus. These lives are full of choices, good and spectacularly bad, but Kozol highlights the institutional forces that shape them: social service bureaucracies that warehouse the homeless in hellholes; immigration regulations that break up families; the academic "killing fields" of the Bronx's terrible middle schools; the neighborhood church whose ministries rescue many kids.