Rachel And Her Children: Homeless Families In America (2006) - Plot & Excerpts
I was reading this when I was attending the National Writing Project. Here is what I wrote in my journal back then:>>It was one of the most infuriating and outrageous books I have read. Kozol is very able to illuminate how humanity can allow humanity to suffer through indifference and lack of compassion. The stories of homeless children simply wrench your heart as the reader is angered by the way in which the government bureaucracy simply allows people to live in subhuman conditions.Kozol shatters the stereotype of the homeless as bums, people uneducated who have nothing to offer. As it turns out, many of these homeless were well-employed people who were hit by tragedy; loss of job, divorce, illness can all combine to bring any of us to an EAU (Emergency Assistance Unit) in search of a shelter. This is the most scary aspect of Kozol's book, the ease with which any of us can fall into homelessness. However, it does not end there. Kozol provides specific stories of homeless families, of children who are basically allowed to die while the wheels of bureaucracy slowly grind. He also writes of those who profit from human misery and of the overburdened heroes struggling to restore some humanity to those whom the system views mostly as a number-a social security number, a Medicare number, a welfare case number, a bed in a shelter number, a body bound for Potter's Field number. While the book was written in the 80s, all the reader needs to do is watch or read the news to see the situation has not changed. Thus the book is just as relevant today as it was a decade ago. The fact that the situation remains the same serves to validate his assessment that this country does not view homelessness as a crisis but as something to be swept under the rug. Overall, I found the book to be an eye-opener, a necessary piece of reading not just for activists but for each of us.<<I wrote that in my journal a little over ten years ago, and it is scary to see now that the book is still relevant, maybe more so now. Sad however is the fact that no politician in the upcoming 2008 election even seems to have any idea about the issue or even be concerned about it. I have gone on to read and enjoy Kozol's other books. Infuriating at times, yes, but worth reading.
The purpose of the book, Rachel and Her Children written by Jonathon Kozol is to make people aware of homelessness in the United States and its effect on families, but mostly children and the community. The author interviews all kinds of people living at The Hotel Martinique in New York City. The theme of the book is that homelessness happens to all kinds of people. Sometimes when you see a homeless person, you can think that the person is bad and they deserve to be homeless. This book makes you understand that good people are also homeless. There are so many homeless people living in the United States and we should try and help them better than we are doing right now. I think the author used several styles when writing this book. It was a description of the homelessness population in New York around 1985. The author used narration by telling stories of the homeless people and how they became homeless. He also used argument by giving facts about a topic to help the reader understand how bad homeless is. The book was very sad. It made me think how lucky I am to have a house and be healthy. It was sad because sometimes people have to wait a long time to get into a shelter. Then sometimes even when they can get into the shelter they don’t want to live there because other people steal their stuff and there is a lot of sicknesses in the shelter and they don’t want to catch the sickness. Homeless people always scared me before but after reading this book I know that some of them are really nice people and it’s not their fault they lost their homes.
What do You think about Rachel And Her Children: Homeless Families In America (2006)?
This book is at once educational and heart breaking. Kozol takes us to New York City during the 1980's, a time of growing poverty and homelessness across the entire nation, and a time of growing disconnect between the poor and those who are supposed to be looking after them. Government funding for aiding those most in need has been repeatedly cut back by the Reagan administration while defense budgets skyrocket and ever more at-risk people, many of them children, are falling through the cracks and into homelessness.Kozol intruduces us to several families, single mothers and children who live in a place called the Hotel Martinique in NYC. Located at 49 West 32nd Street and Broadway at Heral Square, the Martinique, formerly a grand and opulent hotel, was, in those days of the late 1970's and 1980's, a place of abject poverty, desperation and misery. Now, twenty-some years later, the hotel has returned to that for which it was built, a place for people visiting NYC to stay while visiting the city.It's a fair bet that most of the people who stay at the Martinique now could never imagine the horrors that occured there a quarter century ago as many hundreds of families lived in squalor and destitution within it's walls, some even dying there. This is the story of those people who lived at the Martinique and the desperate times they lived in. It is one of the most unsettling books I've ever read...
—Nycdreamin
I really enjoyed the external perspective of the homeless in this book. By this, I mean the governmental institutions of welfare that affect how the homeless go about putting their lives back together. Although Kozol is pretty biased toward the government being at fault rather than a mix of the factors of the individual, mental states, etc., he gives a very good narrative of lives of homeless families and children (especially in New York) and the failure of our society to keep their heads above the tide.
—Annalise Whitacre
This is the first Jonathan Kozol book I have read and I plan to read more of his work. Kozol goes into the NYC family shelter system and exposes the horrible conditions that homeless parents and children must endure. Kozol introduces the reader to real people who share their stories about how they became homeless and how difficult it is to become self-sufficient, mostly due to the flawed welfare and housing assistance programs.My only critique is that the book was published in 1988 and this is a recent re-issue. I wish Kozol had written a short update on the status of the services and policy for homeless people. I imagine that a lot has changed (not necessarily for the better) since the book first came out. Otherwise, this is an excellent and informative book.
—Elyssa
