With this powerful and culminating work about a band of inner-city children he has known for many years, Jonathan Kozol returns to the scene of his prize-winning books Rachel and Her Children and Amazing Grace, also to the kids he has vividly portrayed, to talk about around their fascinating journeys and unexpected victories because they grow into adulthood.

For pretty much fifty years Jonathan offers pricked the conscience of his visitors by laying uncovered the savage about Fire in the Ashes: Twenty-Five Years Among the Poorest Kids in America inequalities inflicted upon kids for no cause but the incident of being created to poverty within a rich nation. Successful of the Country wide Book Award, the Robert F. Kennedy Reserve Prize, and countless other honors, he provides persistently crossed the lines of class and race, 1st as a instructor, then as the writer of sensitive and heart-breaking books about the kids he has called “the outcasts of our nation’s ingenuity.” But Jonathan isn’t a faraway and detached reporter. His personal life has been radically changed by the children who have trusted and befriended him.

Never provides this romantic acquaintance with his topics been more apparent, or more stirring, than in Fire in the Ashes, as Jonathan tells the stories of young men and women who’ve come of age in one of one of the most destitute communities of america. A few of them by no means do get over the battering they undergo in their early years, but many more fight back with brutal and, frequently, jubilant perseverance to overcome the formidable obstacles they face. As we view these glorious kids grow into the fullness of a wholesome and contributive maturity, they ignite a fire of hope, not merely for themselves, but for our society.

The urgent conditions that confront our urban institutions – a devastating race-gap, a pathological regime of obsessive examining and drilling learners for exams instead of providing them with the wealthy curriculum that excites a love of learning – are interwoven through these tales. Why certain children rise above everything, graduate from senior high school and do well in college, while some are defeated by the time they enter adolescence, lies at the essence of this work.

Jonathan Kozol may be the author of Death at an Early Age, Savage Inequalities, and various other books on children and their education. He continues to be known as “today’s most eloquent spokesman for America’s disenfranchised.” But he feels young people speak most eloquently for themselves; and in this reserve, so filled with the vitality and spontaneity of youngsters, we hear their testimony.