Published: April 1, 2000

Death At An Early Age

JONATHAN KOZOL

(New American Library, $13.95)

In 1964, a young teacher and activist named Jonathan Kozol began teaching 4th grade in one of Boston's most over-crowded and dilapidated elementary schools. Like many inner-city schools at the time, the student population was slowly but inexorably turning from white to black. Most of his fellow teachers were white and not happy about the change. As Kozol reports in Death at an Early Age , the book he wrote about his year at the school, they routinely beat unruly students with a rattan and referred to their African American charges as "niggers" and "animals." Some of the black students, Kozol writes, felt so ignored and isolated that they sometimes invited beatings, preferring...