David is Alice Washington's grown son. In fact, he is a young man, a high school senior when first introduced to the reader, forced to grow up too soon because of the dire situation in which his family finds itself. Jonathan Kozol's nonfiction examination of the plight of America's poor, Amazing Grace: The Lives of Children and the Conscience of a Nation, is a serious indictment of the way Kozol believes the United States...
David is Alice Washington's grown son. In fact, he is a young man, a high school senior when first introduced to the reader, forced to grow up too soon because of the dire situation in which his family finds itself. Jonathan Kozol's nonfiction examination of the plight of America's poor, Amazing Grace: The Lives of Children and the Conscience of a Nation, is a serious indictment of the way Kozol believes the United States treats its poor and underprivileged. Alice, David's mother, suffers from AIDS-related complications and is regularly in-and-out of the hospital, specifically, the Bronx-Lebanon hospital that caters to the poor of New York City's South Bronx.
The tenement building in which Alice and David lives is, as one would expect, a dysfunctional environment with crime and disease rampant throughout the community. The South Bronx, as Kozol points out, is the bottom of this massive city's socioeconomic ladder, and its' lack of resources is, the author suggests, the consequence of the cavalier attitude the rest of the nation holds towards the destitute. David is the personification of that attitude. He is smart and driven to succeed, while burdened with the need to care for his extremely ill mother. A student at Taft High School, David informs Kozol of the acronym the students have applied to their school's name: Training Animals for Tomorrow. Taft High School is, Kozol states, "one of the grimmest schools in the United States [where] the self-esteem of students has been crushed . . ."
David serves one of the author's and reader's guides and observers to this dismal world. He is attentive towards his mother -- Kozol notes early-on the way this young man with promise and little prospects diligently cares for his mother when she is hospitalized because of there are too few nurses and orderlies employed at this medical facility -- and realistic about the way in which society has deprived him and his classmates of the opportunities afforded others. Kozol's depiction of David, however, is heartrending. The reader is made aware of the promise this young man holds for a brighter future, but is made equally aware of the limited prospects available to him by virtue of his economic status.
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