The Sea Is So Wide and My Boat Is So Small: Charting a Course for the Next Generation

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. (Sept.)