Check It Out

Ordinary Resurrections: Children in the Years of Hope.
by Jonathan Kozol.
New York: Crown, 2000
Call Number: HQ792.U5 K69 2000
Available for 4-week check out with your SWC photo ID.

The author has written several books on the lack of educational opportunities for poor and minority children in big city public schools, including the seminal and classic Death At An Early Age. In Ordinary Resurrections he tells the personal stories of a group of children just starting school in New York City's South Bronx, one of the poorest and most segregated communities in the nation. This is an optimistic book and most of the children in it are, despite where they live, "... still unsoiled by the world and still can view their place within it without cynicism or despair."

One hopes that the author will write a follow-up to this book to tell us how things have turned out for these children who would now be adults.

Review by John Tibbals, SWC Librarian