Jonathan Kozol and the Struggle Against U.S. Apartheid

Although bookshelves groan under the weight of tracts about U.S. racism, no one's writings on the topic are more unsettling than Jonathan Kozol's. He is among our greatest and most eloquent dissenters. He writes not from studied objectivity but with an impassioned conviction that sears the conscience and haunts the soul. His books, once read, stay with you; his insights, once seen, can never again be unseen. Horrors we once attributed to happenstance or personal failure are revealed by Kozol for what they are: our society's deliberate punishment of innocent poor people, whose very existence reminds us of moral failures we prefer to imagine do not exist.