Amazing Grace Kozol Analysis

“Amazing Grace” is an excerpt from Amazing Grace: The Lives of Children and the Conscience of a Nation by Jonathan Kozol. “Amazing Grace” is about a seven year old boy named Cliffie taking Kozol through South Bronx, showing him all the dreadful, and also interesting things that are going on around the area of St. Ann’s Church. The message in this short excerpt that Kozol sends is that we need to help make the world a better place, by replacing certain bad things with better things. First, by making the world a better place, we can start by protecting the air we breathe. When cities burn trash, the trash releases fumes that pollute the air and make it hard to breathe. In “Amazing Grace”, Cliffie, while eating a chocolate chip cookie, shows Kozol a waste incinerator “burning ‘red bag’ products, such as amputated limbs...bedding bandages.” (l. 74-76) Cliffe calls these products ‘burning bodies,’ relating to how bad the air is around them thanks to the products being burned and how people get sick and can die from not breathing enough good air. If the cities found a new, cleaner way of disposing of trash, like recycling, then we would have cleaner air for everyone.
Second, we can brighten the world by sharing extra goods with people around us that don’t have what we have. For example, Cliffie told

Cliffie showed Kozol a part of the Children’s Park, where “people had tied stuffed bears to the branches of a tree.” (l. 36-37) Cliffie said that this is where a boy was shot in the head, so this is probably a memorial of the kid with all the stuffed animals. This is nice because they are giving remembering the boy who was shot, honoring him with the toys. Another example is Gouverneur Morris, who wrote a preamble to the United States Constitution. Gouverneur Morris is buried at St Ann’s Church along with his wife Anne, so this church could be a memorial of him and his