“People were paying a great deal of money to enjoy an entertainment fashioned from the misery of children of another era. The last thing that they wanted was to come out of the theater at the end and be obliged to see real children begging on the sidewalk right in front of them.” 

Kozol points out the cold ironies present in the situation in Manhattan in the mid-to-late 1980s. While theatregoers were paying a lot of money to see Les Misérables on Broadway, a show about the poverty that propelled the French Revolution, these same people ignored the begging children on the streets of New York City. Kozol’s narrative examines the ways in which these children were shunted aside and then put out of the eyesight of rich Manhattanites by being moved to the Bronx.

“I used to wonder what enduring influence all of this would have upon the capacity of children in the building to believe in any kind of elemental decency in people who have power over their existence.” 

Kozol witnessed the horrors of the Martinique Hotel. The adults who ran the hotel were negligent, and the children lived in a state of deprivation and chaos. They often went hungry and were cold and sick, while their parents slid into a state of deep despair. The city authorities looked the other way, and the building became rife with drug users. Kozol imagines that the abuse and chaos surrounding the children of the Martinique would wind up harming them, and this book is his attempt to figure how the children who were once housed in the Martinique fared as they aged.