fair, objective when possible, and grounded in facts. When an author announces his bias from the beginning, as Kozol does, he should anticipate that the reader might be wary of being manipulated by the persuasions of his evidence or argument. Kozol frankly confesses that his project sides with the underdog; any academic reader might immediately suspect that the underdog will be concomitantly romanticized, and that the underdog's flaws, failings and inadequacies might be glossed over. In this respect the more conservative reader might fault Kozol, whose portrayal of the Chicago's student-body on the south side, for example, is one made up of "beautiful sweet natures" and children "refined by their adversity." (43) It is of course difficult not to grasp at some sort of silver lining for these children, and not to image them as wholly and intrinsically good. But he not only portrays them as morally pure: he sometimes frames what they say in a way that is hardly professional. His experience with a child in Camden, New Jersey, who sees "rainbows in the puddles" prompts him to write that "you have to ask yourself: How long will this child look for rainbows?" (149) The reader notes that the child's observation is neutral; it contains nothing to indicate a sadness or a nobility of character. Yet Kozol's subjective rejoinder is a
...