Jonathan Kozol is the author of Fire in the Ashes: Twenty-Five Years Among the Poorest Children in America, a powerful work that follows a hardened group of impoverished inner-city children he has known and written about for many years. In Kozol’s new book, he tells the story of young men and women who have come of age in one of the most destitute communities in the United States. While some of them are able to fight against extreme poverty to create lives of service and purpose, others do not recover from the ravages of their upbringing. The foremost theme of the text is the urgent issue that confronts our troubled schools: Why do some students rise above the challenges to succeed in high school and college while others fall through the cracks? Kozol, who has been honored with the National Book Award and the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award, will appear at UW-Milwaukee’s Golda Meir Library on Saturday, Sept. 29, at 4 p.m.