Jonathan Kozol has made a career out of crying. Over the span of 30 years and nine books, the 59-year-old author has shed tears for nearly every segment of America’s mistreated underclass, from illiterate welfare mothers in Boston to migrant farm workers in New Mexico. When you care as much about the poor as Jonathan Kozol does, you can’t help weeping.
But Kozol’s tears are more than an outpouring of emotion, they are his bona fides, proof that his research into the lives of the poor — no matter how seemingly fraudulent — must be true, if only because it moves him so strongly. Of course, tears also sell books. A sobbing author makes for a great marketing strategy. And perhaps no writer in America has worked that strategy more effectively, turing moral outrage into dollars and prestige, than Jonathan Kozol.
