Jonathan Kozol has made a good living talking with students. His books chronicle travels among poor, minority children, most of them African Americans in struggling public schools. In the four decades that Kozol, now 70, has been writing books--11 so far--his message has hardly wavered: minority children are unsuccessful because rich, white Americans have little interest in using their vast resources to help them. In each of his works Kozol seems intent on burdening other white upper-class Americans with guilt enough for them to see the light and share their wealth. With this attractive message Kozol has won a loyal following among school teachers, policymakers, and book-reading citizens. In this article, the author discusses the educational issues that have been addressed in Kozol's books, and concludes that though he writes with a compelling sense of injustice, much of Kozol's work is a form of self-reflection that masks--brilliantly, given the popularity of his books--what is an increasingly skewed description of American schools. (Contains 1 figure.)