“Easily the most passionate, and certain to be the most passionately debated, book about American education in several years … A classic American muckraker with an eloquent prose style, Kozol offers … an old-fashioned brand of moral outrage that will affect every reader whose heart has not yet turned to stone.”
—Entertainment Weekly
“Moving … Shocking … Heartbreaking.”
—Ruth Sidel, The Nation
“It is neither ironic nor paradoxical to call Savage Inequalities a wonderful book—for Kozol makes it clear that there are wonderful teachers and wonderful students in every American school, no matter what ugliness, violence, and horror surround the building.”
—Chicago Tribune
“The great virtue of Jonathan Kozol’s new book about inner-city schools is that it overcomes that ‘everybody knows’ problem by bringing an undulled capacity for shock and outrage to a tour of bad schools across the country. As soon as Kozol begins leading the way through a procession of overcrowded, underheated, textbookless, barely taught classrooms, the thought he surely intended to engender begins to take form: How can this be?”
—Washington Post Book World
“Poor children of all colors are increasingly looked upon as surplus baggage, mistakes that should never have happened. Indeed, an older view is returning that any attempts to educate the lower orders are doomed to fail. There can be more than one way to read the title of Jonathan Kozol’s depressing—and essential—book.”
—Andrew Hacker, New York Times Book Review
“Mr. Kozol exposes lemons in American educational facilities in the same way Ralph Nader attacked Detroit automobile makers.”
—Herbert Mitgang, New York Times
“This book digs so deeply into the tragedy of the American system of public education that it wrenches the reader’s psyche.… A must-read for every parent, every educator, and every relevant policymaker.”
—Alex Haley, author of Roots and
The Autobiography of Malcolm X
“A powerful appeal to save children by redistributing the wealth. It will cause angry, but perhaps fruitful, debate.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“Startling and compelling … Crucial to any serious debate on the current state of American education.”
—Publishers Weekly
“A superb, heart-wrenching portrait of the resolute injustice which decimates so many of America’s urban schools.”
—David J. Garrow, Pulitzer Prize–winning
author of Bearing the Cross