Amazing Grace by Jonathan Kozol While reading Amazing Grace, you cannot escape the seemingly endless stories of hardship and pain. The setting behind this compelling story is the South Bronx of New York City, with the main focus on the Mott Haven housing project and the surrounding neighborhood. Here, black and Hispanic families try to cope with the disparity that surrounds them. Mott Haven is a place where children have to stand in the hallways of the building, because playing outside is too risky. In the summer the building is full of mice and cockroaches, in the winter there is no heating and water. This image of the "ghetto" is not one of hope, but of fear. The hospitals serving the neighborhoods are also dirty and lack the staff needed to ensure quality primary care. If clean sheets are needed, patients should put them on themselves. This book is full of stories of real people and their struggles. Each story, although different in content, has the same underlying point, survival. During a tour given by Cliffie (a 7-year-old boy Kozol met at the local church), the reader sees the neighborhood through the eyes of a child. Cliffie shows the reader a once green park, which is now dried up and brown with teddy bears hanging from tree branches due to children being killed in that area. Further down the block, the place where "people's bodies are burned" is indicated. It turns out it was an incinerator for hazardous waste hauled in from New York City hospitals. No, no bodies, just things like the occasional amputated limb, fetal tissue, needles, dirty bedding and used bandages are piled up until they can be burned. On days when they burn the air is heavy and...... middle of paper......has problems. Problems do not arise from one individual nor stop at another, but constantly recur despite different situations. This method only increases the intensity of the problems. When you close the book or go to sleep at night the problems not only end, but continue to grow. Kozol leaves his stories without conclusions. He doesn't make assumptions or use politically correct rhetoric about how things could be better. The point is the shock that there is no easy solution. The problems never end. In the conclusion of his book he lists the names of everyone who died in the time it took him to complete his book. The only conclusion it offers is a list of senseless deaths that never ends. Works Cited: Kozol, Jonathan. Extraordinary Grace: The Lives of Children and the Conscience of a Nation. New York: Harper, 1996.