The Sea Is So Wide and My Boat Is So Small
Charting a Course for the Next Generation
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- $7.99
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- $7.99
Publisher Description
In America today, the gap between the rich and the poor is the greatest ever recorded--larger than any other industrialized nation. It has become far too easy to ignore the hardships of millions of children plagued by poverty, poor health, illiteracy, violence, adult hypocrisy, and injustice. As founder and president of the Children's Defense Fund, Marian Wright Edelman knows all too well the suffering of so many of our nation's children, who live every day with adversity most of us can barely imagine. In The Sea Is So Wide and My Boat Is So Small, Edelman asks difficult questions about what we truly value, and looks hard at what we can--and must--do to build a nation fit for all children. With the passion and conviction that have made her our leading child advocate, she calls us all to stand up for the future of America. What have we done and what have we left undone? What lessons can we learn from our past and our present to realize a just and peaceful national and world vision for our children and grandchildren?
Marian Wright Edelman challenges all of us--our leaders, our teachers, the faith community, parents, grandparents, and future generations--to end the epidemic physical and spiritual poverty afflicting millions of our children. We can leave our children with a better, safer, and fairer world if we care enough. And we can--and must--do it now.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In a series of open letters to parents, educators, young people, Dr. King with whom she collaborated on the 1968 Poor People's Campaign and her own grandchildren Edelman (The Measure of Our Success), founder and president of the Children's Defense Fund, addresses the millions of children silently suffering from abuse, abandonment and poverty. The author passionately inveighs against parental and community neglect ("Adults are what's wrong with our children," she writes); however, her rhetoric, marked by repetitive calls for change and use of jargon like "the Cradle to Prison Pipeline," is an ineffective vehicle for her good intentions, and the text long on grim statistics occasionally reads uncomfortably like a grant proposal. Her book comes to life when the author reminisces about her childhood and rousingly condemns government's support of the nation's richest citizens. Readers seriously concerned about the plight of American children may find many concrete suggestions for action, but the slew of numbers and lack of personal stories in the opening sections will certainly dissuade many others.
