Authors at Festival of Books Shine Light on Social Problems

Several authors used their moment in the sun and celebration of the Festival of Books on Sunday to take fair-goers to often dark and overlooked corners of society, reminding them that books can build community by showing readers frightening and foreign worlds--including those in their own city or country.

The annual book fair, sponsored by The Times, bridges the vast expanse of Southern California by bringing hundreds of thousands of readers to the UCLA campus. There, the crowds can meet scores of authors while enjoying outdoor performances by stir-frying chefs, singing dinosaurs and eager booksellers.

A few writers on the second day of the festival emphasized that books can help to break down divisions among Americans. Just as the festival brings residents from a metropolitan area of 15 million people and authors from throughout the world to a common place --if only for two days--the books can reveal to readers the common ground they might unknowingly share with others.

For Jonathan Kozol, that mission is served by exploring schools in one of the nation’s poorest communities, a blighted neighborhood in the South Bronx. Though everyone has a stake in public schools, Kozol has lamented in several books the neglect and deprivation of inner-city campuses.

The failure to adequately fund public schools in low-income communities mocks democratic ideals, Kozol has written, a position summed up by the title of one of his books, “Savage Inequalities.”

Kozol repeated that contention, but spent much of his time discussing the somewhat different approach taken in his latest book. In “Ordinary Resurrections,” Kozol reflects on the optimism and compassion maintained by children and their teachers in a community with a 75% unemployment rate.

The same children who face conditions Kozol described as savage have moved and inspired him through everyday acts of tenderness, Kozol said. Kozol, a 60-year-old bachelor, recounted how a grade school boy comforted him when his elderly father was ailing, instinctively placing a reassuring hand on his forearm, and asking him if he felt better “if someone who loves you does something for you.”

The point of such stories, Kozol said, is to fight the stigmatization of the poor he sees dwelling in the minds of the wealthy. “They are not precocious criminals. They are not predators,” he said.

Kozol, a Harvard graduate and Rhodes scholar, said that for America to truly be a meritocracy, conditions must improve for our poorest children. “Most of my friends who went to Harvard and take their kids there to meet the admissions dean think they got what they achieved in life through merit. I used to think so too, until I asked myself what if I had to compete against millions of black and Hispanic kids who had the opportunities my father bought for me,” he said.

In a later panel on “The Search for Community,” other authors asserted that stereotypes continue to divide us, and books might be an antidote.

Helen Zia, a San Francisco Bay Area writer and a former top editor of Ms. magazine, said Los Angeles is an apt place for such a discussion, because “this is the center of media and Hollywood, which is where we learn much of what we know about each other,” adding that much of it is wrong.

Zia said she wrote her book “Asian American Dreams: The Emergence of an American People” because she was angered at the portrayal of Asian Americans as foreigners in news stories about allegedly illegal campaign contributions.

Books uncover complex truths that often lurk beneath superficial impressions was a theme often heard. Mitchell Duneier, author of “Sidewalk,” a study of street vendors in New York, used his book to make the case that the vendors are not nuisances in public space, as some believe, but people who have made the best of being outcasts, sometimes coming out of prisons or mental institutions.

Meanwhile, a subject of the book, Hakim Hasan, displayed to the audience just how starkly reality can differ from stereotypes. Hasan became a sidewalk vendor after a series of corporate jobs. For him, the streets were a refuge from oppressive “corporate racism.”

Miles Corwin, a Times reporter who followed the lives of gifted students at Crenshaw High School, wrote his book, “And Still We Rise,” for some of the same reasons as Kozol.

Corwin views the dismantling of affirmative action as caused in part by the mistaken notion that poor minority students are underachievers. He said he was inspired to write his book at the murder scene of a junior high school boy mistaken for a gang member.

As detectives searched the boy’s body, they found a folded-up test in his back pocket. The paper was filled with neat print “like that of a draftsman” expounding on the French Revolution. At the top of the page was a large “A.”