I really enjoyed the book, Amazing Grace, Jonathan Kozol. I think that I liked it so much because it was possible for me to relate to. Kozol centers much of the book around the children who live in the South Bronx. For someone my age or younger to go through these horrible everyday occurrences described in the book is something unimaginable for me and most people. Although these kids have been through the roughest of times, their natural innocence is still visible even though their harsh environment has given them depressing views and sad thoughts of the world.
As a result of the media, there is a larger gap between the poor inner city kids and the middle class children put into the minds of Americans. The media does this by portraying inner city poor kids as being stupid and not caring about their school work or lives. They show them as just wanting to party, do drugs, drink and take part in dangerous or criminal activities. People think the speech of poor city kids will be different and automatically assume that these children are unintelligent. This book shows that many kids are in school but sadly because of lack of money, the schools aren't able to provide a good education. Some kids just see dropping out as a better alternative. Money is the root of the problem. A quote which Kozol's book provides about this is the following.
?Like many children I have come to know in the South Bronx, Jeremiah and his friends do not speak during our meeting in the jargon that some middle-class Americans identify with inner-city kids. There's no obscenity in their speech, nor are there any of those flip code-phrases that are almost always placed within the mouths of poor black children in the movies---a style of speech, I sometimes think, that maybe exaggerated by the media to lend a heightened sense ofdifferentness? to children in the ghetto. Children, however, are good at psyching out a stranger; it may be that these children would speak somewhat differently to someone they know better.
