Amazing Grace
The Lives of Children and the Conscience of a Nation
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Narrated by:
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Dick Hill
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By:
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Jonathan Kozol
About this listen
Amazing Grace is a book about the hearts of children who grow up in the South Bronx - the poorest congressional district of our nation.
The children we meet through the deepening friendships that evolve between Janathan Kozol and their families defy the stereotypes of urban youth too frequently presented on TV and in newspapers. Tender, generous, and often religiously devout, they speak with painful clarity about the poverty and racial isolation that have wounded but not hardened them.
"It's not like being in a jail," says 15-year-old Isabel. "It's more like being hidden. It's as if you have been put in a garage where, if they don't have room for something but aren't sure if they should throw it out, they put it there where they don't need to think of it again."
Without rhetoric, but drawing extensively upon the words of children, parents, and priests, this book does not romanticize or soften the effects of violence and sickness. Amazing Grace makes clear that the postmodern ghetto of America is not a social accident but is created and sustained by greed, neglect, racism, and expedience. It asks questions like, What is the value of child's life? What do we plan to do with those whom we have decided are superfluous? How tough do we dare to be?
©1996 Jonathan Kozol (P)2010 Brilliance Audio, Inc.Listeners also enjoyed...
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Story
When Edward M. Hallowell was 11, a voice out of nowhere told him he should become a psychiatrist. A mental health professional of the time would have called this psychosis. But young Edward (Ned) took it in stride, despite not quite knowing what "psychiatrist" meant. With a psychotic father, an alcoholic mother, an abusive stepfather, and two so-called learning disabilities of his own, Ned was accustomed to unpredictable behaviour from those around him and to a mind he felt he couldn't always control.
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Love and connection permeates through this book!
- By Steve Steinmetz on 06-29-18
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The Warmth of Other Suns
- The Epic Story of America's Great Migration
- By: Isabel Wilkerson
- Narrated by: Robin Miles
- Length: 22 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
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From 1915 to 1970, this exodus of almost six million people changed the face of America. Wilkerson compares this epic migration to the migrations of other peoples in history. She interviewed more than a thousand people, and gained access to new data and official records, to write this definitive and vividly dramatic account of how these American journeys unfolded, altering our cities, our country, and ourselves.
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Superior non-fiction
- By Lila on 05-20-11
By: Isabel Wilkerson
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The Pursuit of Happyness (Abridged)
- By: Chris Gardner
- Narrated by: Andre Blake
- Length: 5 hrs and 42 mins
- Abridged
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At the age of 20, Chris Gardner arrived in San Francisco to pursue a promising career in medicine. However, he surprised everyone and himself by setting his sights on the competitive world of high finance. Yet no sooner had he landed an entry-level position at a prestigious firm, Gardner found himself caught in a web of incredibly challenging circumstances that left him part of the city's working homeless with his toddler son.
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Very Good Story!
- By Lito Da Critic on 06-02-06
By: Chris Gardner
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The Hour I First Believed
- A Novel
- By: Wally Lamb
- Narrated by: George Guidall
- Length: 25 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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When high-school teacher Caelum Quirk and his wife, Maureen, move to Littleton, Colorado, they both get jobs at Columbine High School. In April 1999, while Caelum is away, Maureen finds herself in the library at Columbine, cowering in a cabinet and expecting to be killed. Miraculously, she survives. But when Caelum and Maureen flee to an illusion of safety on the Quirk family's Connecticut farm, they discover that the effects of chaos are not easily put right.
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excellent all around yarn
- By G. on 01-10-09
By: Wally Lamb
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Dorothy Day: The World Will Be Saved by Beauty
- An Intimate Portrait of My Grandmother
- By: Kate Hennessy
- Narrated by: Randye Kaye
- Length: 13 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
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Dorothy Day (1897-1980) was a prominent Catholic, writer, social activist, and cofounder of a movement dedicated to serving the poorest of the poor. Her life has been revealed through her own writings as well as the work of historians, theologians, and academics. What has been missing until now is a more personal account from the point of view of someone who knew her well.
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Great content.HORRIBLE Narration. Cannot listen.
- By Christian on 04-21-17
By: Kate Hennessy
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Life in a Jar
- By: Jack Mayer
- Narrated by: Patrick Lawlor
- Length: 14 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
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During World War II, Irena Sendler, a Polish Catholic social worker, organized a rescue network of fellow social workers to save 2,500 Jewish children from certain death in the Warsaw ghetto. Incredibly, after the war her heroism, like that of many others, was suppressed by communist Poland and remained virtually unknown for 60 years.
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Love of neighbor
- By minime on 03-26-16
By: Jack Mayer
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Born Bright
- A Young Girl's Journey from Nothing to Something in America
- By: C. Nicole Mason
- Narrated by: Robin Eller
- Length: 8 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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Born Bright, C. Nicole Mason's powerful memoir, is a story of reconciliation, constrained choices, and life on the other side of the tracks. Born in the 1970s in Los Angeles, California, Mason was raised by a beautiful but volatile 16-year-old single mother. Early on, she learned to navigate between an unpredictable home life and school, where she excelled. By high school, Mason was seamlessly straddling two worlds.
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Solid Book
- By Daryl on 11-06-16
By: C. Nicole Mason
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The Undocumented Americans
- By: Karla Cornejo Villavicencio
- Narrated by: Karla Cornejo Villavicencio
- Length: 4 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
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Writer Karla Cornejo Villavicencio was on DACA when she decided to write about being undocumented for the first time using her own name. It was right after the election of 2016, the day she realized the story she'd tried to steer clear of was the only one she wanted to tell. So she wrote her immigration lawyer's phone number on her hand in Sharpie and embarked on a trip across the country to tell the stories of her fellow undocumented immigrants—and to find the hidden key to her own.
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Raw, heartbreaking - we can do better by others
- By RapaciousReader on 04-11-20
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Dreams from My Father
- A Story of Race and Inheritance
- By: Barack Obama
- Narrated by: Barack Obama
- Length: 14 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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In this lyrical, unsentimental, and compelling memoir, the son of a Black African father and a White American mother searches for a workable meaning to his life as a Black American. It begins in New York, where Barack Obama learns that his father - a figure he knows more as a myth than as a man - has been killed in a car accident. This sudden death inspires an emotional odyssey - first to a small town in Kansas, from which he retraces the migration of his mother’s family to Hawaii, and then to Kenya, where he meets the African side of his family.
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Powerful
- By Gene R. on 10-26-21
By: Barack Obama
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The Song and the Silence
- A Story About Family, Race, and What Was Revealed in a Small Town in the Mississippi Delta While Searching for Booker Wright
- By: Yvette Johnson
- Narrated by: Robin Miles
- Length: 9 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
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"Have to keep that smile", said Booker Wright in the 1966 NBC documentary Mississippi: A Self-Portrait. At the time Wright was a waiter in a Whites-only restaurant and a local business owner who would become an unwitting icon of the civil rights movement. For he did the unthinkable: Before a national audience, he described what life was truly like for the Black people of Greenwood, Mississippi.
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Exceeded every expectation
- By ZeeJ84 on 05-23-21
By: Yvette Johnson
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Under Red Skies
- Three Generations of Life, Loss, and Hope in China
- By: Karoline Kan
- Narrated by: Allison Hiroto
- Length: 8 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
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A deeply personal and shocking look at how China is coming to terms with its conflicted past as it emerges into a modern, cutting-edge superpower.
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An intimate view of real life in China
- By Lonnie G. Hardy, Jr. on 08-15-19
By: Karoline Kan
What listeners say about Amazing Grace
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Anonymous User
- 11-26-18
I love this book, it really made me happy
this book made me happy and helped me feel better because I looked at my life differently than i had before.
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- Amazon Customer
- 07-07-19
Just not fair.
Excellent book! Opened my eyes to the injustices of the haves and have not's. Basic services and schools should be funded in according to their needs, not their tax base.
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- T. C. Pile
- 06-05-20
The Roots of Change are in Education
Listening to Dick Hill's impassioned delivery of Kozol's all-too-real description of the lives of children in the South Bronx 30 years ago is taking me back to Jonathan Kozol’s Death at an Early Age—a book that changed my life 50 years ago. The story he has been telling has been the same since then: to root out inequality and prejudice, you have to start at the root: Early Childhood Education and K-12 programs.
If you’re looking for a way to confront white privilege deeply during this time of searching for healing responses to the divisions in our society, dig into Jonathan Kozol’s work. You will see through different eyes. And, no offense, @DickHill, I truly enjoyed listening to you, but a white man doing black street vernacular doesn’t age well.
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3 people found this helpful
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- Wanda
- 10-02-19
Eye-Opening
This book is eye-opening and very well written. The stories told in from the children and Mrs. Washington will not soon be forgotten. This book should be shared among friends and family. Many times I described it to friends and family and they were amazed they didn't know how poor and segregated the South Bronx community was. THis is a hard read in that it is emotional and will and should make you feel things. Enjoy.
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- Kelli
- 11-12-12
A Poignant Look at the South Bronx in the 1990s
I think this book would have had much more of an impact if I'd read it back in 1995 when it was first published. The cold sad truth is that these stories are now all-too-familiar in many impoverished neighborhoods around our nation including in my own city of Birmingham, Alabama. Although I have not studied the statistics, my gut tells me that the income gap between the poorest poor and the richest rich in New York City has widened substantially since this book was written. The New York Times, however, reported just this year about the number of middle class professionals, many of them white, moving into the neighborhoods described in Jonathan Kozol's book. Apparently the attraction is affordable real estate, an increasingly safe neighborhood where major crime has plummeted over the past 20 years, and a reasonable commute to jobs in Manhatten. I'm pleased to hear that the reputation of the neighborhood is changing for what appears to be the better but I would be very interested in a follow up book on the children highlighted in "Amazing Grace." Where are they today and have those precious children benefited from the enhancements and improvements in their neighborhood? My prayers may have already been answered as Kozol's newest book, Fire in the Ashes, which was published in August 2012 does just that.
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- kermit
- 11-05-17
Useless
The book is badly dated. The content described poverty in the 1990's and is mostly the story of one or two adults and a few teenagers living in NYC. It is not a story of children living in poverty.
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