Jonathan Kozol Speaker & Booking Information

After all these years writing about children and their public schools, Jonathan Kozol decided it was time at last to open up a private aspect of his life. Jonathan’s most recent book, The Theft of Memory: Losing My Father One Day at a Time, is about his father’s astonishing career as an eminent physician—a specialist in disorders of the brain—and his remarkable ability, at the onset of Alzheimer’s disease, to diagnose himself, explain the causes of his sickness, and then to narrate, step by step, his slow descent into dementia. Early readers describe it as a fascinating story of the bond between a father and son and the way that bond intensifies even as the father’s cogency and verbal gifts progressively abandon him.

Jonathan is best known as an advocate for low-income children. A Harvard graduate and former Rhodes Scholar, his work among young children started in the passion of the civil rights campaigns of 1964 and 1965, when he gave up the prospect of a promising career in the academic world, moved from Harvard Square into a poor black neighborhood of Boston, and became a fourth grade teacher. He has since devoted nearly his entire life to the challenge of providing equal opportunity to every child in our public schools.

Death at an Early Age, a description of his first year in the classroom, received the 1968 National Book Award in Science, Philosophy, and Religion. Among his other mother works are Rachel and Her Children, a study of homeless mothers and their children, which received the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award, and Savage Inequalities, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award of 1992.

His 1995 best-seller, Amazing Grace: The Lives of Children and the Conscience of a Nation, received the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in 1996, an honor previously granted to the works of Langston Hughes and Dr. Martin Luther King. Nobel Laurent Toni Morrison wrote that Amazing Grace was “good in the old-fashioned sense: beautiful and morally worthy.” Elie Wiesel said, “Jonathan’s struggle is noble. His outcry must shake our nation out of its guilty indifference.”

Ten years later, in The Shame of the Nation, Jonathan wrote that “separate and unequal” had returned with a vengeance to our public schools; and, in his most recent book, Fire in the Ashes, he described the impact this had had upon a group of young adults whom he had known since they were children.

Jonathan lives today in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He continues to advocate for children and works closely with their teachers. He’s been doing that for more than fifty years. He isn’t stopping now.