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What Is The Summary Of Fire In The Ashes By Jonathan Kozol

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Title: Fire in the Ashes, Jonathan Kozol, Broadway Books Introduction: As a well accomplished writer, activist, and educator, Jonathan Kozol has devoted his life to the challenge of providing equal education to every child in our public schools. Summary of the contents: Fire in the Ashes is an intuitive and exciting book that details social justice at its core. The poor are getting poorer, the rich richer. Yet, when these children are faced with obstacles placed by a society who cares more about money than education, they prove that everything is circumstantial. In Jonathan Kozol’s coming of age novel, he depicts the stories of young men and women who grow up in some of the most destitute communities in the United States. Rape, …show more content…

Many of the families in Kozol’s book live in central Manhattan in drug-infested buildings, falling apart from the brick in, whereas in earlier periods of New York’s history were fine hotels. One of such buildings is the Martinique Hotel, where Kozol afforded much of his time to the families that dwelled there, as referenced in his book. Those who inhabit the Martinique Hotel are symbolically affected by New York’s renown valor in their conscious, further placing them in the class as “less-fortunate” within a city that does not afford them many opportunities. Many homeless neighborhoods find themselves victim to substandard medical and education facilities. The families, as Kozol describes were shipped by the masses to communities that already suffer from the city’s highest rates of HIV, drug addiction, pediatric asthma and psychiatric illness (Kozol 11). There is the idea, as Kozol says, that the homes that these families find themselves in are “closed systems”, “where rules of normal law and normal governance did not apply” (Kozol 8), whereas the people are detached from the rest of society, confined to the community all in itself. The families he works with are sectioned off by society because they live in poor areas and confined within a capitalistic economy, have nowhere to go. In a way, Kozol describes these areas as the capital of homeless people, surrounded by a city built for the wealthy, by

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