Life at the Bottom
SCHORR, LISBETH B.
Life at the Bottom There Are No Children Here: The Story of Two Boys Growing Up in the Other America By Alex Kotlowitz Doubleday. 324 pp. $21.95. Reviewed by Lisbeth B. Schorr Lecturer...
...The poignant testimony on this point in There A reNo Children Here should impel not only academics, but policy makers and politicians as well to focus on the social forces that obstruct the passage out of poverty...
...The three oldest of Mrs...
...For Mrs...
...No other book, no mo vie, no TV show so powerfully portrays the children and families who are outside the American dream...
...Pharoah works desperately to win the school spelling match despite his stutter (which gets worse every time he witnesses another act of violence...
...Unless government at all levels becomes engaged in these efforts with more than rhetoric, however, it is hard to imagine that life will change much for families such as the Riverses...
...He succeeds completely by allowing us to observe—almost to experience—life in Chicago's Henry Homer public housing project as it is lived by two boys, Lafeyette and Pharoah Rivers...
...Now I simply tell my audiences Alex Kotlowitz' story of the Rivers family...
...At his graduation from eighth grade, Lafeyette "laughed and smiled and embraced his mother and friends with such warmth and spirit that everyone around him was filled with pride and hope for him...
...author, "Within Our Reach: Breaking the Cycle of Disadvantage" Over the past two years I have spent much of my time speaking to public officials, professionals and community leaders about successful efforts to change the destiny of poor and otherwise disadvantaged children...
...But only after reading There Are No Children Here did I find a way to accurately and persuasively convey what every policy maker and citizen needs to know about living in the midst of concentrated poverty and social dislocation...
...Drug gangs, gunfire and death at an early age were the stuff of their daily existence...
...In the housing project, home to 6,000 families, it serves 28 children...
...Alex Kotlowitz' book should raise the chances of massive social action—on a scale that will match the enormity of the need he so eloquently describes...
...Nearly half the families in the Henry Horner Homes have no phones, and few know anyone who would let them use theirs...
...Kotlowitz believes that Americans will respond once they truly understand what life is like at the bottom, and the false economy of consigning the poor to conditions that make it almost impossible for children to grow up whole...
...The two neighborhood health clinics closed in 1989...
...Having received a $2,000 award for his Journal story about the Rivers family that was a forerunner to the book, he used the money to bail out one of the older children from jail...
...At the end of the book, Kotlowitz confesses to getting more involved with his subjects than journalists are supposed to...
...The disastrous effects of hostile environments on the development of youngsters and on the functioning of parents are at last beginning to attract the attention of scholars...
...Not much else works there either...
...In describing the brothers' yearning for normalcy, their pleasure in shooting marbles and playing basketball amid the destruction around them, the author implies that those who worry about high risk children and dysfunctional parents could profit from thinking also about the devastation caused by high risk circumstances...
...I soon discovered that before people will pay attention to solutions, they need a shared understanding of the problem...
...Drug abuse was rampant, but there was no drug treatment or rehabilitation program...
...Rivers "the neighborhood had become a black hole...
...Sociologist Frank Furstenberg, after studying the interconnections between disadvantaged neighborhoods and families in Philadelphia, concluded that "if we are committed to strengthening the family, we must give more attention to rebuilding local institutions—schools, churches, neighborhood centers, and recreational services —that support families...
...She lived in daily fear that her younger ones wouldn't survive at all...
...Attentive mothers don't allow their children outside to play...
...The earnings from the book are helping to send Pharoah and Lafeyette to private school...
...We have the ability to assure that the children who require help will receive it from the most competent professionals and the most comprehensive services...
...We are left with a feeling of unbearable sadness that the public school, the institution Americans once looked to as providing the most promising route out of poverty, has now become one more force propelling inner city youngsters toward destruction...
...These children should no longer be dependent on schools, clinics, social agencies, and housing that are understaffed and overwhelmed, offering the worst and the least...
...The elevators, the trash chutes and the washing machines are beyond repair...
...Just 10 and eight years old, respectively, when the author approached their mother, LaJoe Rivers, about writing this book, the brothers were surrounded by unceasing violence...
...Influential organizations throughout the nation, including major foundations and business groups, are venturing into bold new efforts to strengthen human service institutions in reaction to the growing public alarm about the Other America...
...In 1987, as the shootings in the project increased, she started paying $80 a month for burial insurance for her 10 and eight-year-old sons and her four-year-old triplets...
...A 12-year-old boy explained that the only way to keep from getting involved with gangs is "to try to make as little friends as possible...
...One, a Chicago Commons' program called Better Days for Youth, targets children under 13 in trouble at school or with the police...
...Rivers' children, to whom she felt she had given everything she could, had dropped out of school, been in jail, and become involved with drugs...
...The nearest working washing machine is a mile away...
...There were no public libraries, movie theaters, skating rinks, or bowling alleys...
...There were no parks, no banks—only currency exchanges that charged customers up to $8 for every welfare check cashed...
...Although Kotlowitz admits he was often scared to be in the West Side neighborhood, he hung out with the two boys and their friends—talking, watching television, eating in local restaurants, getting to see their world from the inside...
...Reviewed by Lisbeth B. Schorr Lecturer in social medicine, Harvard...
...Where there used to be 13 social service agencies, there are now three...
...Yet neither Kotlowitz nor his friends, Lafeyette and Pharoah, have succumbed to despair...
...Kotlowitz, a Wall Street Journal urban affairs reporter, says he hoped to put a human face on the people trapped in abandoned inner city neighborhoods...
Vol. 74 • May 1991 • No. 7
