Jonathan Kozol's Crying Game

...The account was a surprise bestseller, winning the National Book Award and launching Kozol's career as author and social critic...

...But it isn't writing that brings in the biggest checks...

...In other words, if William F. Buckley, Jr...

...In 1963, Kozol returned to the United States with plans of becoming a lawyer...

...Kozol then enrolled at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar...

...In Dallas last month pitching his new book, Kozol took a room at the Adolphus, one of the most expensive hotels in the city, whose rates start at more than $200 a night...

...In other instances, Kozol seems to have simply lifted a reporter's words verbatim, without benefit of quotation marks...

...Not even a rusted jungle gym," reported the Tribune...

...The only source for his many descriptions of the place appears to be a single article from Town and Country magazine...

...At one point, Kozol appropriates (without giving credit) a vignette from the Tribune about a little girl named Keisha who has punched a classmate in an argument over a crayon...

...The poor are not poor through any fault of their own, Kozol explains again and again, but because of the greed and hypocrisy of the rich...

...Kozol, who has never raised any kids of his own, relishes his role as protector of and spokesman for The Children...

...In the rewritten Kozol version, the same event becomes a parable about harsh institutional authority: "'Keisha, look at me,' an adult shouts at a slow reader in a sixth grade class...

...I just felt like crying...

...As if to prove her point, Kozol held a news conference shortly after the book was published to warn of imminent housing riots...

...There are no swings...

...A sobbing author makes for a great marketing strategy...

...Needless to say, Kozol doesn't mention this inconvenient fact in his book-indeed, he quotes Overall making remarks about the moral deficiencies of the people who live in wealthy parts of Manhattan...

...Sometimes," he says, after checking into one swanky inn or another, "it would startle me to come into an elaborate-looking lobby...

...Vincent de Paul...

...His own home, he told a reporter recently, is a terribly modest affair, "a shack...

...Kozol's image as a tireless and truthful recorder of gritty urban reality has been accepted pretty much uncritically, so it is surprising that key sections of his much-touted 1991 book on inner-city schools, Savage Inequalities, appear to have been written by other people...

...Jonathan Kozol, in other words, has the credibility that comes from first-hand experience on the streets...

...In the second chapter of Savage Inequalities, for instance, Kozol describes at length scenes from Goudy Elementary, a deteriorating public school in Chicago...

...Not that he likes it of course...

...Why not...

...While promoting his book about home-lessness, for instance, Kozol didn't bunk in shelters...

...The kid sounded more Marxist in Kozol's book than I had felt he was...

...Asked about the apparent discrepancy between his ideology and his affection for fancy hotel rooms, Kozol explains that he's no hypocrite, but actually a victim of American capitalism...

...When you care as much about the poor as Jonathan Kozol does, you can't help weeping...

...Like Kozol, the Rev...

...Evil exists," Kozol has him saying...

...Affluent as he may be, Kozol does his best to hide it, with a studied indifference to wealth whenever reporters come near...

...In the Tribune version, a school counselor gently tries to reach the girl, who she fears is slipping away...

...Over the span of 30 years and nine books, the 59-year-old author has shed tears for nearly every segment of America's mistreated underclass, from illiterate welfare mothers in Boston to migrant farm workers in New Mexico...

...Savage Inequalities isn't the only book in which Kozol has employed dubious research techniques...

...And he has done it by identifying with-rather than simply writing about-poor people...

...Overall has nothing but disdain for the well-off and, like him, has made a career rich in media appearances out of identifying with the underclass...

...I simply want people to weep...

...Sometimes you feel so close to tears that you lack the, the will to, to scream...

...You was until today," the girl replies, "the tears spilling out of her eyes" and falling "onto a page in her math book...

...One magazine writer remembers reading an interview Kozol did with a young Puerto Rican boy "who I happened to have interviewed also on a different pretext...

...stays at the Plaza, Kozol is forced to as well...

...I believe that what the rich have done to the poor people in this city is something that a preacher would call evil...

...You can try to make your life as austere as possible," he says, "but there's no way of escaping the contradictions of our society...

...They may have been getting teary at the Star Tribune, but at Kozol's publishing house the mood was considerably lighter...

...Like many professional advocates for the poor, Kozol comes from a privileged background...

...Ann's Church in the South Bronx...

...Local Realtors says its real value is probably at least 20 percent more, making it one of the more expensive houses in town...

...A stream of other books followed, which Kozol cranked out between jobs as an itinerant college lecturer and organizer for Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers...

...And perhaps no writer in America has worked that strategy more effectively, turing moral outrage into dollars and prestige, than Jonathan Kozol...

...But such details are hardly the point...

...If you're trying to engage in the cultural and political debates that exist in America today, you have to do it on the same terms as the people on the other side of the political spectrum...

...As it turns out, over a crayon...

...Still, it's hard not to hear strains of Harvard in some of the things Kozol's characters say...

...By the fall of 1964, however, he had changed course and begun work as a temporary teacher in a public elementary school in Roxbury, a poor section of Boston...

...This many poor families-mothers, fathers, children-are not going to remain silent and passive forever," he cautioned...

...I am in strongest possible opposition to the present social order of the U.S.," he wrote in his 1975 The Night Is Dark and I Am Far from Home...

...You told me I was your favorite teacher, isn't that what you said...

...Those characters in Amazing Grace who are identified by name frequently don't sound much like people one is likely to meet in the South Bronx...

...When I get tired," he explained to the Washington Post recently, "I get on the subway and go to Boston, or get on the Number 6 train in New York and go up to the South Bronx, or in Washington go to Anacostia, and I just spend one hour sitting in the kitchen of one of the families I know...

...I cried a lot, you can't avoid it," he lamented to the Seattle Times (which in turn described Kozol as the "nation's most revered oracle for impoverished children...

...Over what...

...At one point in Amazing Grace a young black man lays some street wisdom on Kozol's mostly middle-class readers: "'We know the real killer,' says a black musician in response to those who say that it is violent rap music that is spawning death and rage...

...If you want to solve the problem" of poverty, offers Alice Washington, the AIDS-suffering (she got it from her husband) protagonist of Amazing Grace, "raise the taxes everywhere in the United States...

...The killer is in the street in which we live like rats.'" A trip through the endnotes identifies this philosopher only as "unnamed rap musician cited, MacNeil-Lehrer NewsHour...

...It's a very sad story, and I cried a lot while I was writing it, and a lot of people tell me they cry when they read it," he confided to Charlie Rose last month...

...His 1978 Children of the Revolution is a paean to Fidel Castro, whose literacy programs Kozol called a "pedagogical victory unheralded in the modern world...

...My digestion is better...

...You know I care about you," says the counselor...

...Leaving early to become a novelist, he spent the next four years living in Paris-for a time in the same Latin Quarter hotel as Beat writers William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg-trying unsuccessfully to produce a book about his Russian immigrant grandmother...

...I'd rather be here...

...They take me to fancy restaurants in Midtown Manhattan, but I lose my appetite," Kozol told New York Times writer Peter Applebome over a $2.35 tunafish sandwich at the ostentatiously low-brow B&V pizza shop in the South Bronx...

...a wonderful location for intensive, residential health care for malnourished, worm-infested, tick-infected, navel-distended infants...

...It does not require a radical perspective to recognize that those who have a firm hold on the market of American ideas will not foster an ability to question the ideologies they live by...

...Washington's son David proves equally politically aware...

...Kozol admits he reconstructed some of the dialogue in Amazing Grace-"much of the book wasn't written as the result of interviews, but grew out of conversations," he says-so it is easy to imagine that some of his own words may have ended up in the mouths of poor people he met...

...Kozol's politics seemed to get more extreme with time...

...Kozol had once again bawled his way onto the bestseller list...

...His 1988 book about homeless-ness, Rachel and Her Children, was so overheated that even Anna Quindlen panned it in the New York Times as "advocacy journalism...

...He went on to describe the pledge of allegiance as "a ritual of unforgivable deceit...

...I was one time asked to speak to a group of librarians in Ohio," remembers Diane Ravitch, who also writes about education...

...According to Mosle, the editors, who had first serial rights, decided not to go ahead and publish excerpts of Savage Inequalities, even after Kozol filed a lawsuit to force them to...

...Indeed, the publication of his latest book, Amazing Grace: The Lives of Children and the Conscience of a Nation, an account of life in a South Bronx neighborhood, appears to have set the author off on another binge of sobbing...

...In another section, while describing the relative merits of New York's daily newspapers, Washington says she prefers the New York Times, and "will not buy the New York Post...

...Misti Snow, an aptly-named staff writer at the Star Tribune in Minneapolis, seemed happy to oblige...

...But Kozol's tears are more than an outpouring of emotion, they are his bona fides, proof that his research into the lives of the poor- no matter how seemingly fraudulent-must be true, if only because it moves him so strongly...

...But, it turns out, empathy only goes so far...

...In a review of Amazing Grace this fall, she noted that "it takes longer than one would think to read this book...

...One of the more memorable characters in his latest book, for instance, is an Episcopal priest, Martha Overall, pastor of St...

...The killer is not a song...

...Look at me in the eye.' Keisha has been fighting with her classmate...

...Declining an invitation to attend President Clinton's inauguration, Kozol made a show of his simplicity for a reporter from the St...

...Twenty years ago, he described how he felt after spending the afternoon in an affluent friend's house, a property he estimated at the time was worth about $100,000: "It occurs to me, as I am sitting here, that this would make a nice school . . . a good, removed and isolated rest house for narcotics addicts...

...By the time he was fired six months later-for, in the words of school authorities, "continual deviation from the 4th grade course of study"-his diary approached book length...

...Who can pretend that literacy is not political...

...In places throughout the book, Kozol's own, seemingly firsthand descriptions turn out to be thinly (and often inaccurately) rewritten versions of news stories...

...In Chicago, he stayed in what the local newspaper called "a luxury hotel just off Michigan Avenue...

...asks Kozol...

...The child is terrified and starts to cry...

...Kozol has in the past defended himself against charges that he alters quotes by calling such criticism racist: Only a white bigot, he says, would doubt that poor children from the ghetto can speak like affluent kids who go to Exeter...

...I spent much of the last two years crying," he told Editor and Publisher magazine in one of the countless media profiles and reviews timed to coincide with the new book's release...

...Despite the price, Kozol is in demand on the lecture circuit, particularly from teachers' organizations, whose champion he has been for 30 years...

...He began to keep a journal of his experiences...

...It was striking to me because I thought, 'Hey, I interviewed that kid.'" If there is a single theme that runs through all of Kozol's books- indeed, though his life-it is hatred and distrust of the affluent...

...But for Jonathan Kozol crying solo is never enough...

...His polemics would be dismissed by ordinary people as out-of-date or boring...

...Two years ago the property's assessed value was almost $200,000...

...Yet Kozol, almost alone among old-line leftists still publishing, has managed to avoid being typecast as a crank...

...In 1992, Kozol called The Night Is Dark "by far my best book...

...Actually, the Kozol residence, a colonial farmhouse in rural Massachusetts, is much more than a shack...

...It's enough to bring tears to your eyes...

...So it's no surprise that he keeps churning out tears...

...It's prejudiced," she replies...

...They don't run the schools and they don't run New York...

...For the sheltered son of a suburban doctor, it was a traumatic experience-"I've never returned in any real sense," he told an interviewer nearly 30 years later...

...Ordinarily, an author still droning on in the 1990s about conspiracies hatched by the military-industrial complex would find his audience limited to faculty members on lesser-known college campuses...

...With the royalties from his books-all of which are still in print-it hasn't been a bad living...

...There are no swings...

...Over the years he has been amazingly successful at winning grants and awards, including two fellowships apiece from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller foundations...

...Given how adamant he has been in his denunciations of the rich- Kozol routinely describes them as amoral monsters who "do not lead lives worth living"-it is interesting to note that Jonathan Kozol lives pretty well himself...

...he asked in conspiratorial tones...

...According to his assistant, Cassie Schwerner, Kozol charges $12,500 per speaking engagement, far more than most authors receive...

...There is enormous anger building up in these shelters and in the streets...

...They told me they really wanted Jonathan Kozol but they couldn't afford him, so they had settled for me...

...Kozol has been making similar statements for most of his life...

...So, ever resourceful, Kozol came up with a solution: "Whenever I could, I would invite the homeless, people I was writing about, to come and visit me...

...Weep and pray and ask for forgiveness for what they have done to these children...

...Not that Kozol has to worry about what hotel rooms cost...

...It was published soon after under the title Death at an Early Age...

...The nearly all-black school was in dismal shape, with crumbling classrooms and bigoted, sadistic teachers...

...That way, he says, "they could enjoy a few moments of enjoying a pretty lobby...

...In Illiterate America, published in 1985, Kozol claimed that a third of the adult population, 60 million Americans (the Census Bureau's estimate at the time was between 17 and 21 million), was unable to read because of a plot by Big Business and the Reagan administration to keep the workers ignorant...

...He also demands comprehensive travel expenses (full-fare coach tickets only, which make for an easy upgrade to first class...

...She only works there, commuting to the ghetto each day from the most exclusive section of Manhattan, the Upper East Side...

...Maybe David actually said these things...

...Sometimes . . . I didn't feel like writing anything," he explained to the Atlanta Journal and Constitution in 1992 while on book tour flogging his then-bestseller, Savage Inequalities...

...In Kozol's world, good people naturally come off as poor- whether they are or not...

...In Los Angeles, he bedded down in Beverly Hills...

...Others have to join in, too...

...It has been suggested before...

...But it is not clear that Kozol ever actually went to Goudy, since nearly all of his reporting seems to come straight from a 1988 Chicago Tribune series on urban schools...

...Soap, paper towels and toilet paper are in short supply," writes Kozol...

...And it is the children, he says, who have suffered most so that the rest of us can "have the lowest possible taxes and enjoy our earnings to the full...

...There are some poor people in the Social Register, too," she says, explaining why she doesn't plan to take her name out of the book...

...Kozol, after all, doesn't just research his books, he lives them, spending years in urban areas empathizing with the downtrodden before telling their story to an indifferent America-working, as he put it a few years ago, in his capacity as "the medium through which voiceless people make themselves heard...

...It's a wonder the book ever got written at all, he explained to the Dallas Morning News, since he had to stop so frequently to "sit quietly and cry...

...Louis Post-Dispatch, explaining, "I don't have a tuxedo...

...In a sense," Kozol once told the Chicago Tribune, "I practice my religion in homeless shelters and airports...

...Then again, when was the last time you heard any person under 50, no matter how well educated, use the correct pronoun- "him," not "them"-with the antecedent "someone...

...Overall, of course, doesn't live in the South Bronx...

...All the anger comes back...

...Three years later, Kozol is as lachrymose as ever...

...Not that her home address is hard to come by...

...Amazing Grace had just gone into its sixth printing, bringing the total number of copies in circulation to 125,000...

...It just seems strange...

...Of course, tears also sell books...

...They don't control the hospitals...

...These weren't just youthfully intemperate words, either...

...Among the sources cited in Kozol's latest work, Amazing Grace, are "a student written New York City periodical," a Home Box Office video, and the translation of a screenplay for a 1947 French movie-that last being the source for an alleged quote from St...

...One must take time to weep...

...All were roughly in the mold of Death at an Early Age-part reportage, part policy paper, held together with a goo of angry adjectives and leftist aphorisms...

...The son of a prominent psychiatrist (his father testified as an expert witness at the Patty Hearst trial) and a social worker, Kozol grew up in tony Newton, Massachusetts...

...For editors at Newsday, the apparent dishonesty was too much...

...Tears spill out of her eyes and onto the pages of her math book...

...The drug dealers don't have any power over the economy," observes a 16-year-old named Maria by way of affixing blame for the city's problems...

...Soap, paper toweling and toilet paper are not always available for the children," observed the Tribune...

...It can be found right in the Social Register, where this committed redistributionist is a long-time listee...

...In another place, railing against the injustice of inadequate health care, David describes routine practice in a local hospital: "As soon as they know that someone has TB they're supposed to isolate him in a room, but sometimes it's a day or two before they get to him...

...Kozol goes on to contrast the barren atmosphere at Goudy Elementary with the lush abundance of New Trier, an affluent high school nearby...

...There is no jungle gym," writes Kozol...

...This is how America works today," Kozol says gravely...

...After preparing at one of the better private schools in the area, he went to Harvard and studied writing under poet and former assistant secretary of State Archibald MacLeish...

...I have no wish for people to read this book and come away from it full of hope," he told the Associated Press in November...

...In each city," wrote Mosle, a former teacher and a self-described liberal, "he culls the local newspaper for anecdotes to support his preconceived notions...

...But Kozol doesn't seem to have visited New Trier either...

...Kozol appears to have done no original reporting," concluded writer Sara Mosle, who reviewed the book for New York Newsday in 1991...

...Like the Washington pundits he despises, Kozol makes his real money giving speeches...