Printable Biography of Jonathan Kozol

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Since then, he has devoted four decades to issues of education and social justice in America.

The Chicago Sun-Times has called Kozol "today’s most eloquent spokesman for America’s disenfranchised." He has made a practice of leaving comfortable surroundings for challenging, impoverished areas, documenting what experiences in his several best-selling and provocative books.

Kozol began his career teaching fourth grade. He was fired for reading from a book of poetry by Langston Hughes that was not on the approved curriculum list. Soon after, he wrote his first work of nonfiction, Death at an Early Age: The Destruction of the Hearts and Minds of Negro Children in the Boston Public Schools, based on his teaching. The book won the National Book Award in Science, Philosophy, and Religion in 1968. Now regarded as a classic by educators, it has sold more than two million copies in the United States and Europe.

Kozol's books involve firsthand accounts of his experiences and bear witness to social problems such as segregated and unequal schools, illiteracy, and homelessness. Often Kozol succeeds in humanizing abstract social issues by involving the reader intimately with particular individuals who are directly affected by these issues.

In his newest book The Shame of the Nation, Kozol returns to the battle with his strongest, most disturbing work to date: a powerful expose of the conditions he has found in visiting and revisiting nearly 60 public school in 30 different districts in 11 states throughout the past five years. Written with deep respect and empathy for embattled teachers and filled with the voices of some of the most revered and trusted leaders in the black community, The Shame of the Nation is a triumph of firsthand reporting.

His book Amazing Grace: The Lives of Children and the Conscience of a Nation, exploring the lives of inner-city residents in the South Bronx. The Washington Post Book World calls it "a powerful book that lays bare what is surely the ugliest truth about us: that there are pockets of hell in our inner cities, and that even as an entire sector of America is condemned to burn in them, we insist on looking the other way."

Among the other highly honored books that he has written are Rachel and Her Children, which received the Robert. F Kennedy Book Award in 1989 and the Conscience in Media Award of the American Society of Journalists and Authors, and Savage Inequalities, which won the New England Book Award and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1992. He also wrote Savage Inequalities, a searing expose of the extremes of wealth and poverty in America's public school system and the blighting effect it has on poor children and Ordinary Resurrections, a more introspective work about the spiritual and moral qualities of children he had come to know in the South Bronx.

Where Ordinary Resurrections has become a personal favorite among schoolteachers, The New York Times described it as "deeply moving, the most personal of Kozol’s efforts." At the forefront of social and educational examination, Amazing Grace, Savage Inequalities and Death at an Early Age are now considered required reading at most universities and is part of the curriculum for future teachers and religious leaders.