Books: Not Fair RACHEL AND HER CHILDREN

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In a sense, Kozol is not being fair in his passionate presentation of these tragedies. Even the word homeless is a bit misleading in that it implies people sleeping on the streets in the snow, while Kozol is really writing about welfare cases, about the poor, whom ye have with you always. And all those he interviews are invariably the virtuous and the innocent -- the others presumably do not give interviews. But Kozol is not really trying to be fair. An award-winning gadfly of the Boston schools where he once taught (Death at an Early Age, Illiterate America), he is trying to assault and appall his readers, to jar them from their complacent acceptance of the young beggars on their doorstep. To some extent, he succeeds in arousing anger. He quotes Robert Coles as saying that these are times when people "have to throw up their hands in heaviness of heart . . . and say, in desperation: God save them, those children; and for allowing such a state of affairs to continue, God save us too."

Well, yes, that sounds fine, but what is actually to be done? One icy morning in New York last month, the frozen bodies of two newborn babies were found in trash heaps in different parts of the city. Neither one had a name. The newspapers devoted no more than a few lines to the story.