[NYTr] Jonathan Kozol Discussion & Book-Signing - Pasadena - Aug 26

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

sent by Ed Pearl

A Recently-Added Educational Event Not to Miss!

Jonathan Kozol discusses and signs Letters to a Young Teacher

Vroman's Bookstore, Pasadena, CA (See below)
Sunday, August 26, 4pm

Join us for an exciting new addition to the August calendar ~ Jonathan
Kozol, the National Book Award winner and bestselling author of Savage
Inequalities, Rachel and Her Children, Shame of the Nation and the
enduring educational classic, Death At An Early Age, heads to Vroman's
for an evening of enlightenment on pertinent issues facing education
today.

It was in 1964 that Jonathan "a Harvard graduate, Rhodes Scholar &
Guggenheim Fellow " first moved from Harvard Square into a poor black
Boston neighborhood to become a fourth grade teacher. His book, Death
At An Early Age, described his first year as a teacher and went on to
win the 1968 National Book Award in Science, Philosophy and Religion.
In 1980, he became increasingly concerned with the number of adults
that couldn’t read, and at the request of the Cleveland Public Library,
he designed a literacy plan for the nation’s larger cities which also
served as the basis for a similar effort undertaken by the State
Library of California. It was this project that inspired the
publication of Illiterate American, and later became the center of a
national campaign to spur private & federal funding for adult literacy.
A few years later ~ in 1989~ he revisited American schools, heading to
both rich & poor institutions in more than 30 communities; the
resulting book that followed, Savage Inequalities: Children in
America’s Schools, became a critically-acclaimed sensation, hailed by
major publications across the country as "powerful" and
"searing" (Time), "crucial" (Publisher’s Weekly), and "essential" (The
New York Times).

Amazing Grace: The Lives of Children and the Conscience of a Nation was
published in 1995 after he spent 2 years with children, parents &
priests (who befriended him in the process) in one of the most racially
isolated and impoverished neighborhoods in the country: the South Bronx
of New York. It was this gently-written narrative that won him the
praise and respect of noteworthy individuals such as Toni Morrison,
Pulitzer Prize winner David Garrow, and Elie Wiesel among many others.

To date, he's devoted more than 40 years of his life to the reform of
education and social justice in America, and his newest book, Letters
to a Young Teacher, reviews many of the basic issues he's spent his life
exploring. In it, he cleverly weaves his observations ~ as well as a
thinly disguised biographical memoir ~ into a series of 16 letters
written to Francesca, a first-grade teacher at an inner-city public
school in Boston. Overall, the book will delight and encourage
first-year (or for that matter, fortieth-year) teachers who need
Kozol's reminders of the ways that their beautiful profession can bring
joy, beauty, mystery and mischievous delight into the hearts of
children during their years of greatest curiosity.

Vroman's Bookstore | 695 E. Colorado Blvd. | Pasadena | CA | 91101