Chronicler of the underclass.

• Author: Smith, Jordan Michael
• Position: 'Fire in the Ashes: Twenty-Five Years Among the Poorest Children in America' - Book review

Fire in the Ashes: Twenty-Five Years Among the Poorest Children in America

By Jonathan Kozol

Crown. 368 pages. $27.

Jonathan Kozol is a lonely man. Kozol, it is clear from his new book, Fire in the Ashes, has few friends, is divorced, and does not seem to socialize much. "The truth is that I got so caught up in working with other people's children that I never settled down enough to have my own," he told The New York Times a few years ago.

We should all be grateful for his monastic lifestyle, for it makes possible his unceasing devotion to the causes of poverty and public education in the United States. The author of twelve books, including the National Book Award-winning Death at an Early Age, Kozol is the foremost chronicler of America's young underclass.

In his latest effort, Kozol begins at New York City's Martinique Hotel, which was used as a shelter for the homeless and poor in the 1980s. He follows families from 1985 up to the present day. The Martinique was a "decrepit, drug-infested" place, overcrowded with desperate citizens, garbage, and drugs, Kozol writes. It "was a place of flagrant and straightforward criminality on the part of management and ownership," he adds, and he includes the city and country at large in his indictment.

Some of the families featured in Death at an Early Age never escape. Boys, who are much more likely to lose themselves to crime and drugs than girls, "received [at the Martinique] their first induction into cynical behavior, distancing, dishonesty, and patterns of evasiveness" that often stayed with them for the rest of their (sometimes short) lives. Parents succumbed to depression, while girls had trouble growing into women without being abused.

A woman named "Alice," for instance (real names and other details in the book are disguised), falls prey to HIV. Another woman, "Ariella," manages to save herself but not her son, who is killed from his reckless behavior on a subway.

As a whole, the children usually find themselves behind their classmates in school, when they are able to attend school at all, and this disadvantage is nearly impossible to fully overcome.

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Not all the stories end in sadness.

"Leonardo," a hilarious, observant boy, manages to find a secure, meaningful existence for himself, despite his asthma and a father in jail and a mother with severe depression.

"Pineapple" bosses Kozol around, as a third grader telling him to clean up his clothing and attempting to set...