Free Essays - Amazing Grace :: Amazing Grace Essays

Within the next few pages here I intend to address twain issues. First I will distort togive a personal review of what I saw this book to hold, and second I will try explain therevelence which this book has to the field of Public Administration. First try to picturechildren in a slum where the squalor in their homes is just as speculative as that which is in thestreets. Where prostitution is rampant, thievery a common place and murder and death adaily occurrence. Crack-cocaine and heroin are sold in corner markets, and the dead eyesof men and women temperamental about aimlessly in the streets of Mott Haven are all tocommon., Their bodies riddled with disease, disease which seems to control theneighborhood. This is Mott Haven, in New York Citys South Bronx, the outback of thisAmeri canful nations poorest congressional district, also the setting of Jonathan Kozolsdisturbing representation of poverty in this country. The stories, which are capturedAmazing Grace, are told in the simp lest terms. They are told by children who have seentheir parents die of AIDS and other disease, by mothers who complain about teenagersbagging dope and loading guns on fire escapes, by clergy who teach the poor to fightinjustice and by police who are afraid to answer 911 calls. Kozol seems to be disparageabout the situation of the poor in American today, especially when more and more thepoor are blamed for being poor. Kozols portrait of life in Mott Haven is gentle andpassionate. regular though rats may chew through apartment walls in the homes of MottHaven, the children still say their prayers at night. What seems to bother Kozol is thatmany people do not level(p) want to look at this picture of America, but in Amazing Gracehe dares us to recognize it does exist. Kozol spent a year wandering through Mott Haven and its neighboringcommunities visiting churches, schools, hospitals, parks, and homes. Talking with parentsand kids, social workers, religious leaders, and principals and teachers struggling to tryto understand how these children and parents cope with poverty and violence. Kozol trysto determine how their fellow citizens can tolerate, even demand policies that guaranteemisery and death for those living a few subway stops north of glitzy midtown Manhattan. Perhaps nothing can stymy the tides of social policy where citizens of this nation areallowed to live in such conditions. If on the other hand anything can, it may be Kozolsforecasting visions and the openness and earthly concern of the remarkable people whose