Battling Against Homelessness : Booksellers Assn. Uses Book as Catalyst for Social Change

Jonathan Kozol wants his book to change the world. It’s not an unusual--if usually hopeless--ambition. But Kozol is actually getting a chance--and a lot of help.

Armed with copies of Kozol’s “Rachel and Her Children,” booksellers will meet with governors of more than 20 states today to urge them to take action against homelessness. Chief executives in states such as Alaska, North Dakota, Illinois and Maine will receive copies of the book about the misery and bureaucratic entrapment of homeless families in New York from delegations of local booksellers.

Proposed Legislation

Meanwhile, Kozol, the National Coalition for the Homeless, the National Governor’s Assn. and the American Booksellers Assn. will hold a press conference Wednesday in Washington, D.C., to introduce model legislation for dealing with homelessness at the state level. The events coincide with the publication of the paperback edition of “Rachel and Her Children,” first published early last year. (California Gov. George Deukmejian declined a meeting, a representative of the booksellers said. Deukmejian’s office could not confirm that it had been contacted to arrange a meeting.)

“I write to change the world,” said Kozol, who has campaigned extensively for the last 25 years to improve education and combat illiteracy and who founded The Fund for the Homeless to provide emergency assistance to homeless families. “It isn’t a very humble approach. . . . If you’re writing about fly fishing it really doesn’t matter, but if you’re writing about the homeless, the purpose ought to be to find them a home.”

Kozol also noted that he has had little to do with orchestrating this week’s blitz, arranged by the booksellers association and the paperback publisher Fawcett/Columbine. “I don’t organize things like that. I’m a writer,” Kozol said.

Much-Praised Book

As an exercise in publicity, today’s events seem likely to work, at least locally. It is much less certain whether the effort can help transform a much-praised book into a catalyst for national social change.

Since they began organizing today’s barrage months ago, backers have been touting “Rachel and Her Children” as a work that is both literature and inspiration for action. It has, they argue, the potential to achieve the stature of Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring,” Michael Harrington’s “The Other America,” or even “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” of the Civil War era.

But while Carson’s book alerted the world to the environmental dangers of pesticides and Harrington’s helped inspire the War on Poverty of the 1960s, Kozol himself doubts whether the United States in the 1980s is a fertile place for ideas that sprout from books. Even in paperback, it’s not the type of book “that’s sold in airports,” he said.

In fact, the success the book has already had--massive publicity on publication, glowing reviews, sales of about 40,000 copies in hardcover, serialization in the New Yorker magazine--has surprised the author and activist.

“If this were just a sad story, that (the success) would be understandable,” Kozol explained in a telephone interview from his home in Byfield, Mass., “but this is a manifesto and manifestoes have not been in fashion in Ronald Reagan’s America. It’s harder for a book to have an impact now. When ‘The Other America’ was published in the early 1960s, the country was ready to move in a way that it’s probably not ready to move today.” He noted that just last month the President said he believes many homeless people are homeless by choice.

Edward A. Morrow Jr., a Vermont bookstore owner and president of the booksellers association, conceded that the entire enterprise, inspired by Kozol’s speech to a booksellers convention in Anaheim last year, may have only an ephemeral effect. And the full impact of Kozol’s book won’t be discernible for years, he said.

“ ‘Rachel and Her Children’ is a particularly depressing book to read,” Morrow said, explaining that its content may turn off some readers. “I don’t think we’ll be able to tell if it has the same stature as the other books unless ‘Rachel’s Children’ becomes a buzz word for the problem of homelessness five years from now.”

But the problem of homelessness itself has become inescapable even in largely rural Vermont. In his town of less than 4,000, “we have homeless people living in their cars,” Morrow said.

Kozol, best known for “Death at an Early Age” about the horrors of a Boston public school, finds some reasons for optimism about homelessness and his book. “Rachel and Her Children” has fared better initially than his other two books, although “Death” and “Illiterate America” have sold millions of copies and continuously remained in print. He credited the book’s success so far partly to its focus on children, who suffer physical, emotional and intellectual damage from the hardships of homelessness. By Kozol’s estimate, there are 500,000 homeless children and more than double that number of homeless people in this country.

“Americans can distance themselves from an aging wino in the streets but they can’t do that as easily with children,” Kozol said.

Increased Audience

He also said that serialization in the New Yorker increased his audience many times beyond what he could normally expect and that the end of the Reagan presidency may create a more receptive attitude for social action.

“With the waning of the Reagan era, I think that a lot of Americans sort of woke up to the fact that the rich and affluent had been on an orgy of unabashed avarice,” Kozol asserted in his characteristic blunt manner. ‘The country is now going through “a kind of moral hangover” and “sometimes our vision is a little clearer on the morning after,” he said.