Soul Searching

By Lonnie Harp

Byfield, Mass.

A lethal dose of Lemon Pledge overwhelms the tight interior of author Jonathan Kozol's converted farmhouse. In the kitchen, Spic and Span, Windex, Comet, and lesser-known cleansers cover the breakfast table--a suitable buffet for the house's first proper cleaning in two years. Scores of books lay in order on a sofa near the fireplace. In the dark brick office off the living room, neat stacks of papers and legal pads rise at uneven heights, their bulk and shadows resembling modern art. Kozol comes in the back door with an empty blue mop bucket and apologizes that it has taken so long to fetch it. The young housekeeper, who arrived this morning with only a hint of the mammoth job before her, assures him that it will be a while before she dives into mopping. She wipes her forehead, smiles, and raises her eyebrows, punctuating her understatement. Walking back outside his 250-year-old cedar-shingled house on the edge of this picture-book village, Kozol pauses to savor the significance of cleaning day. He surveys his spacious back yard and breathes deeply, satisfied by the cooling breeze, the dense line of tall trees, the crisp blue sky. The former teacher who has spent his adult life documenting the effects of segregation and poverty on children has finally emerged from an intense year of writing and rewriting his latest project, iAmazing Gracej, due in bookstores this week. For a year before that, he immersed himself in the book's subject, a New York City neighborhood that is among the poorest and most dangerous in the country.

Standing here with the writing behind him (he recently approved the last of the proof pages) and the clutter and cobwebs under attack, he assesses the heavy toll of the past two years. The job proved unusually consuming and troubling. It left him saddened and weak. He has lost 25 pounds, battled asthma for the first time since childhood, and, at age 59, realized that he is no longer...