Amazing Grace: The Lives of Children and the Conscience of a Nation was published by Crown Publishers in 1995. Kozol spent several years in Mott Haven, the poorest congressional district in America — a neighborhood in the South Bronx where the median household income was under $8,000, where one in four residents was HIV-positive, where childhood asthma rates were the highest in the nation, and where the average life expectancy was shorter than in Bangladesh.
What distinguishes Amazing Grace from Kozol’s other books is its method: rather than documenting institutions (schools, housing), he documents people — particularly children. He walks the streets with them, visits their apartments, attends their churches, and records their observations about the world they live in. The children’s voices are the book’s heart: clear, articulate, observant, and possessed of a moral intelligence that shames the society that has abandoned them.
The title is not ironic. Kozol — a secular Jew — finds in the churches of Mott Haven and in the faith of the residents a genuine grace that survives conditions of extreme deprivation. The residents’ Christianity is not opium but resistance: a refusal to accept that their lives are valueless, a insistence on dignity that the larger society denies them. The book asks why a nation as wealthy as America chooses to maintain these conditions — and the word “chooses” is deliberate, because Kozol demonstrates that the poverty of Mott Haven is a policy outcome, not a natural disaster.
Collecting Amazing Grace
First edition (Crown Publishers, New York, 1995): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition in dust jacket: $10–$25
- Signed first edition: $25–$60