[Death at an Early Age] is an all-out attack on the Boston school system and tends to use the author's classroom experiences only as ammunition for that attack…. [Callous] indifference … is amply documented in his book, and Mr. Kozol certainly emerges from the book as a dedicated teacher. But he is so incensed by the conditions under which he worked that his book tends toward the melodramatic with innocent black children cowering under white racist school officials—plainclothes Cossacks, as it were, sent in to ride herd on the ghetto.

Perhaps because he taught in the Boston schools when there was a great deal of public clamor about bussing black children into white schools, Mr. Kozol's book is in large part a polemic against segregated schools. If one is not already aware of the horrors that can sometimes or even frequently be found in such schools, Death at...