["Prisoners of Silence"] is a book with a clear, specific issue. In American society, where words are so critical, at least 25 million people are "functionally incompetent," and Jonathan Kozol … argues for a national campaign to fight adult illiteracy.

A crash program worked in Cuba, Israel and Brazil, Mr. Kozol says, and it could work here—with young men and women working at subsistence wages, living in the same conditions as those they are teaching…. Only by experiencing crime, disorder, police neglect and abuse, says Mr. Kozol, can these teachers avoid "condescension." And only through teaching "action" words, which will enable adult illiterates to express their rightful anger at society's deprivations, will they reach the real sources of the inability to read and write.

All this may sound like a book left over from 1967—but it is not, although Mr. Kozol's deliberate avoidance of academic neutrality sometimes colors the...