Fire in the Ashes: Twenty-Five Years Among the Poorest Children in America Audiobook (Free)

With this powerful and culminating work about a group of inner-city children he has known for many years, Jonathan Kozol comes back to the picture of his prize-winning books Rachel and Her Children and Amazing Grace, also to the kids he has vividly portrayed, to talk about with us their fascinating journeys and unexpected victories as they develop into adulthood.

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

Never has this seductive acquaintance with his subjects been more apparent, or more stirring, than in Fireplace in the Ashes, as Jonathan tells the tales of young men and women who have come old in another of probably the most destitute communities of the United States. A few of them hardly ever do recover from the battering they undergo within their early years, but a lot more battle back with brutal and, frequently, jubilant perseverance to conquer the formidable road blocks they face. Even as we watch these glorious children grow in to the fullness of a wholesome and contributive maturity, they ignite a flame of hope, not merely for themselves, but also for our society.

The urgent issues that confront our urban academic institutions – a disastrous race-gap, a pathological regime of obsessive examining and drilling learners for exams instead of giving them the wealthy curriculum that excites a appreciate of learning – are interwoven through these tales. Why certain kids rise above everything, graduate from senior high school and prosper in college, while others are defeated by enough time they enter adolescence, lies at the fact of this function.

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