Jonathan Kozol has 5 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 4 narrators, with an average listener rating of 5★ across 1 ratings. The most-rated is Fire in the Ashes.
Fire in the Ashes
Summary
In this powerful and culminating work about a group 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, and to the children he has vividly portrayed, to share with us their fascinating journeys and unexpected victories as they grow into adulthood. For nearly 50 years Jonathan has pricked the conscience of his readers by laying bare the savage inequalities inflicted upon children for no reason but the accident of being born to poverty within a wealthy nation. A winner of the National Book Award, the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award, and countless other honors, he has persistently crossed the lines of class and race, first as a teacher, then as the author of tender and heart-breaking books about the children he has called "the outcasts of our nation’s ingenuity." But Jonathan is not a distant and detached reporter. His own life has been radically transformed by the children who have trusted and befriended him. Never has this intimate acquaintance with his subjects been more apparent, or more stirring, than in Fire in the Ashes, as Jonathan tells the stories of young men and women who have come of age in one of the most destitute communities of the United States. Some of them never do recover from the battering they undergo in their early years, but many more battle back with fierce and, often, jubilant determination to overcome the formidable obstacles they face. As we watch these glorious children grow into the fullness of a healthy and contributive maturity, they ignite a flame of hope, not only for themselves, but for our society. The urgent issues that confront our urban schools - a devastating race-gap, a pathological regime of obsessive testing and drilling students for exams instead of giving them the rich curriculum that excites a love of learning - are interwoven through these stories. Why certain children rise above it all, graduate from high school and do well in college, while others are defeated by the time they enter adolescence, lies at the essence of this work. Jonathan Kozol is the author of Death at an Early Age, Savage Inequalities, and other books on children and their education. He has been called "today’s most eloquent spokesman for America’s disenfranchised." But he believes young people speak most eloquently for themselves; and in this book, so full of the vitality and spontaneity of youth, we hear their testimony.
©2012 Jonathan Kozol (P)2012 Random House Audio
Amazing Grace
Summary
Amazing Grace is a book about the hearts of children who grow up in the South Bronx - the poorest congressional district of our nation. The children we meet through the deepening friendships that evolve between Janathan Kozol and their families defy the stereotypes of urban youth too frequently presented on TV and in newspapers. Tender, generous, and often religiously devout, they speak with painful clarity about the poverty and racial isolation that have wounded but not hardened them. "It's not like being in a jail," says 15-year-old Isabel. "It's more like being hidden. It's as if you have been put in a garage where, if they don't have room for something but aren't sure if they should throw it out, they put it there where they don't need to think of it again." Without rhetoric, but drawing extensively upon the words of children, parents, and priests, this book does not romanticize or soften the effects of violence and sickness. Amazing Grace makes clear that the postmodern ghetto of America is not a social accident but is created and sustained by greed, neglect, racism, and expedience. It asks questions like, What is the value of child's life? What do we plan to do with those whom we have decided are superfluous? How tough do we dare to be?
©1996 Jonathan Kozol (P)2010 Brilliance Audio, Inc.
Ordinary Resurrections
Summary
Jonathan Kozol's books have become touchstones of the American conscience. Unlike his previous books, however,
Ordinary Resurrections is almost entirely narrative and takes us into the fascinating details of daily life as he has lived it with young children who befriended him over the course of several years.
Like Amazing Grace, this book describes the children of New York's South Bronx, but it is a markedly different book in mood and vantage point. Here, we see life through the eyes of the children, not, as Kozol puts it, from the perspective of a grown-up man encumbered by a Harvard education. Here, too, we meet some dedicated and inspired teachers in an underfunded but upbeat public elementary school, and we return once more to St. Ann's Church and meet the parents and religious figures in the children's lives.
Public Domain (P)2005 Brilliance Audio, Inc.
Savage Inequalities
Summary
Jonathan Kozol traveled from the most blighted neighborhoods of Chicago to the urban wreckage of Camden, New Jersey; from the ghetto suburbs of Detroit to inner-city San Antonio; East St. Louis, and Washington, D.C. Everywhere, he discovered separate systems of public schools, with the children of America's poor condemned to schools that are underfunded, understaffed, physically crumbling, and imbued with despair. The richest Americans congratulate themselves on the large sums they invest in their children's schools, while the poor actually devote proportionally larger shares of their incomes to education. Savage Inequalities carries a sense of urgency and immediacy, and will certainly revive debate on the most vital, fundamental, and controversial issue facing America today!
©2010 Jonathan Kozol (P)2010 Brilliance Audio, Inc.
The Shame of the Nation
Summary
Over the past several years, Jonathan Kozol has visited nearly 60 public schools. Virtually everywhere, he finds that conditions have grown worse for inner-city children in the 15 years since federal courts began dismantling the landmark ruling in Brown v. Board of Education. First, a state of nearly absolute apartheid now prevails in thousands of our schools. The segregation of Black children has reverted to a level that the nation has not seen since 1968. Few of the students in these schools know White children any longer. Second, a protomilitary form of discipline has now emerged, modeled on stick-and-carrot methods of behavioral control traditionally used in prisons but targeted exclusively at Black and Hispanic children. And third, as high-stakes testing takes on pathological and punitive dimensions, liberal education in our inner-city schools has been increasingly replaced by culturally barren and robotic methods of instruction that would be rejected out of hand by schools that serve the mainstream of society. Filled with the passionate voices of children and their teachers and some of the most revered and trusted leaders in the Black community, The Shame of the Nation is a triumph of firsthand reporting that pays tribute to those undefeated educators who persist against the odds, but directly challenges the chilling practices now being forced upon our urban systems by the Bush administration. In their place, Kozol offers a humane, dramatic challenge to our nation to fulfill at last the promise made some 50 years ago to all our youngest citizens.
©2005 Jonathan Kozol (P)2005 Random House, Inc., Random House Audio, a division of Random House, Inc.