Can you provide a summary of each chapter in Jonathan Kozol's "Amazing Grace"?

Since 1967, Johnathan Kozol has written books about the less fortunate in American society. His acclaimed books include Death at an Early Age (1967), Savage Inequalities: Children in America’s Schools (1991) and Amazing Grace: The Lives of Children and the Conscience of a Nation (1995). Like his other works, and Amazing Grace takes both society and government to task for allowing children to grow up in deplorable conditions.

Kozol takes his reader to the South Bronx, New York. This borough continues to be one of the biggest, poorest, and most segregated cities in the nation. People in the South Bronx live in what most of us would consider to be un-livable conditions. Would you consider letting your children play in parks where rusty, toxic chemical containers had been dumped? How about your home backing up to a medical waste incinerator? Or the apartments near a garbage dump? Do your children pass drug dealers and prostitutes as they walk home from school? Probably not. But these conditions, and more, are the norm for residents here. For example, inadequate sanitation procedures also led to increased numbers of rats. These vermin, often disease-carriers, have become so numerous that they have overrun certain buildings and spaces.

When it comes to spending of construction dollars, that money is not spent on constructing new primary schools or improving existing structures; instead, the funds typically go to enlarging or building reform schools or expanding prison. A lack of jobs in the area has made many adults idle and useless; many turn to drugs and crime. Making matters worse, the city, not wanting visitors who spend money to be put off by the large homeless population in New York City and other tony locations, began moving the homeless to the South Bronx; already crowded and unsanitary conditions immediately became exponentially worse. And even though the police moved the homeless to the South Bronx, they did not increase police protection at all. Therefore, crime rates, already high, went even higher.

Ultimately, what makes Kozol’s work so compelling and enduring is that he puts individual faces to the mass human suffering, and in doing so, he is able to dispel many stereotypes about the poor. For example, the author introduces us to a woman named Alice Washington. Alice is a three-time cancer survivor who became infected with the AIDS virus by her former husband. She lives in squalor, but the convoluted red tape of the welfare system has left her without financial assistance. However, despite her very real problems, Kozol shows us Alice’s supreme dignity, and her deserving of respect and kindness. Alice possesses a sense of “nobility” that eludes those who are far better off than she.

We also meet Alice’s son, David, who incessantly cares for, and worries about, his mother. Despite his burden, David finishes high school and earns a scholarship to high school, a feat that flies in the face of many stereotypical notions about the poor. Deeply religious and incredibly observant, David is able to see the “log” in the eye of those who see “specks” in another. (From Matthew 7:5: You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother's eye.)

The rich get richer, the poor get poorer, and the children of the poor suffer the most. The children are innocent and defenseless; they want to lead normal lives like the children of the affluent do. They have the same hopes and dreams, but they grow up in a trap of poverty. They see the adults around them dehumanized by the better off, who claim the poor are criminals, thugs, and “takers” who neither give, nor want to give back to society.

Kozol also talks extensively with the people who run the “Covenant House,” a shelter for homeless teens, founded in the late 1960s. He speaks with clergy who help the poor, who often live in crime-ridden housing projects and with the parents of children who attend low-performing and inadequately-funded schools. These people, who live and work in the South Bronx, tell Kozol about the many afflictions of their flock, from depression, to hunger, to trauma, and more. He hears stories about the prevalence of asthma and the lack of treatment for the uninsured. He learns of the gun deaths in the under-policed neighborhoods and deaths that occur from neglect. People have died from cold in poorly heated rooms. They have died from improperly functioning elevators.

Kozol also stresses the problem of segregation. Even though the Supreme Court ended school segregation in 1959 (Brown v. Board of Education), children of the South Bronx endure what can only be described as a “social quarantine.” Living and going to school in these environments is soul-crushing for children. Kozol compares schools in the South Bronx to those in affluent New York so the contrast can be clear and unmistakable. He blames “class warfare” that the government has encouraged and enabled. Just as Kozol puts faces to individuals in poverty, so too does he identify politicians he feels are to blame for the deplorable conditions of the South Bronx. He identifies former mayor Rudolph Juliani, whose draconian cutbacks to the city’s budget further hurt the already struggling programs for young people and programs for drug and alcohol rehabilitation. The cuts also affected sanitation budgets, leading to even more squalid conditions. Additionally, the layoffs Juliani imposed led to job losses for thousands of social service workers, the majority of whom were minorities. After school programs were shut down and the mayor told these young people that they would just have to “to take advantage of what is out there.” The suggestion was even made that people who receive welfare should be made to clean up the city and wear uniforms while doing so. He argues that New York is engaging in a deliberate “ghettoization” and urges everyone, both conservative and liberal, to acknowledge what is happening and to take action to change it, even if it means the well-to-do might have to give up a little of their boon to help their fellow man.

Can you summarize Amazing Grace by Jonathan Kozol?

In Amazing Grace, Jonathan Kozol writes about the appalling living conditions and life circumstances of people who are trapped in the South Bronx in New York. He is primarily a storyteller, and he tells the stories of several children and their parents in this book. Kozol is also a political partisan, and he intersperses each of these accounts with condemning commentary against Republicans generally and conservatives specifically. He does this by citing the actions of Republican politicians, such as Mayor Rudolph Guiliani, as well as quoting strategic lines from politicians who he claims have caused these problems--or at least caused them to get worse.

Kozol follows David, a young man who is forced to grow up much too early because he has to help take care of his mother when she is sick. David is a young man who seems to have a deep faith, but the most significant aspect Kozol features is David's belief that all the problems of the poor have been caused by and worsened by the rich.

This novel takes us into an overcrowded hospital emergency room where David's mother once again has to wait for a bed to be free before she is treated. This time she has to wait four days on a stretcher in a hospital corridor before she is treated. She needs x-rays but has to wait two days to get them, and David tells the rest of the story:

When they finally found a room for her, she suddenly began to shiver and her hands were cold. They didn't have no blankets. They ran out. I took a blanket to her today. No curtains. So they put a sheet over the window.

They said the diagnosis was pneumonia and a blood clot in her lungs. She's on oxygen and an IV. It's six days since she went in.

Her eventual diagnosis is pneumonia, and she does not qualify for disability because she is not sick enough.

These same kinds of stories--of neglect, heard-heartedness, poverty, despair, hopelessness, and addiction--are repeated on street corners, in classrooms, in neighborhoods, and in homes throughout these impoverished and primarily black ghetto neighborhoods.  

This is not a work of fiction but a collection of stories, but they are moving and poignant. This relentless string of atrocities and horrific circumstances continues throughout the entire book. The only relief, if it can be called that, is Kozol's commentary and accusations interspersed between the stories. 

Some people, says the Times, wonder why the city is planning "to cut services, which would hurt the...poorest residents," while once again planning to cut taxes, "which would help the city's richest....." In a strong editorial, it calls the threatened cancellation of these services "intolerable" and "inhumane."

A deputy mayor, however, says that these reductions in municipal expenditures will be "a victory for everybody," and, notes the Times, on Wall Street the reaction to the mayor's plans is "generally favorable."

As you can see, the stories in this book depict the problems of poverty in the South Bronx, but it is the commentary which makes a strong political statement about who is to blame for these problems, or at least for making them worse. Kozol is not shy about naming specific people in addition to condemning Republicans and especially conservatives as heartless and cruel. Though the stories he tells are impactful and undoubtedly true, Kozol clearly has an agenda; because he does, the book is at times somewhat one-sided in its condemnations of the rich. The truth is that many factors contribute to the problems. 

How would you summarize chapters in Amazing Grace: The Lives of Children and the Conscience of a Nation by Jonathan Kozol?

When summarizing any text, what you want to look for are the important details. Think about the characters in the text and what events take place. You especially want to think about the author's underlying message, or theme. A theme is any idea within the work that is referred to repeatedly. It can be a moral  or just an idea, like poverty, crime, or selfishness. Jonathan Kozol wrote the non-fiction book Amazing Grace: The Lives of Children and the Conscience of a Nation to expose the atrocities concerning how our nation deals with and segregates the poorest of the poor. Specifically, he describes conditions in South Bronx, an area that is described as "one of the largest and poorest racially segregated areas in the United States" (eNotes, "Summary"). What's more he uses the book to point out that many of the area's atrocious conditions are due to prejudiced and selfish Conservative political thinking. Hence, some of the main themes in the book are impoverished conditions, crime rates, lack of education for the poor, and the negative, selfish attitude of the Conservatives. As we are limited in space, below are a few ideas to help get you started.

In the first chapter, Kozol lays out the setting of South Bronx, especially the neighborhood of Mott Haven, that serves as the premise of his book. He shows how the poorest of the poor are segregated from the rich along Brook Avenue, the poorest area being Mott Haven in South Bronx. He describes how in the 1990s the average income of those in Mott Haven was only $7,500 and how all but 5 schoolchildren qualify for free lunches. He describes the area as a ghetto in the truest sense and describes all of the drug dealers and users the children of the area are subjected to. He describes how the government-subsidized tenement buildings do not have adequate heating for the freezing cold New York winters and how the government will pass out blankets and sleeping bags, and tenants will "just cover up ... and hope [they] wake up the next morning" (p. 3). He describes the tenement building as being both roach and rat infested. Kozol also introduces us to some of the persons he relays in the book, especially the congregants of St. Ann's Episcopal church, which stands in one of the deadliest areas in the city due to homicide rates. We especially meet a little boy named Cliffie who takes Kozol as the narrator for a walk around the neighborhood. Through Cliffie's commentary, we learn about the waste incinerator and the areas full of drug dealers and prostitutes. We especially learn that the city of New York is essentially herding homeless people to the area of Mott Haven. We are also introduced to Alice Washington, who is dying of AIDS, and how the AIDS virus is at epidemic rates in the area due to heroine addicts and prostitutes. Finally, we further learn about the inadequacies of the hospital care in the area, especially of the emergency room death rate. Hence, as we can see, Kozol uses all of these details to elaborate on his theme of poverty, impoverished conditions, and lack of government assistance.