The Stolen Year

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“Kamenetz’s reach and aim as a reporter are admirable…reported and written with empathy, care and skill…”

“Anya Kamenetz chronicles the effects of the pandemic on the children of our country, providing a vivid picture of how we have failed our kids, especially those most vulnerable. In clear, concise, well-researched prose, she touches on centuries of U.S. history and the ways we have so often chosen to not support families, interspersed with examples of people taking matters into their own hands to create solutions at home and in their communities….Maybe, as a place to start, this book should be required reading for us all.”

Washington Post

“…painful snapshots of how America failed its schoolchildren are captured in Anya Kamenetz’s thoroughly researched, unsparing and intimately detailed new book, “The Stolen Year: How Covid Changed Children’s Lives, and Where We Go Now.”

As kids head back to school in this third year of the pandemic, Kamenetz has given us an essential read for anyone who wants to understand how American schools and schoolchildren fared in the early days.“

Boston Globe

“For those willing to revisit it, the strain of the lockdown springs back to appalling life in her book.”

In The Stolen Year, NPR education reporter Anya Kamenetz shows that the roots of our crisis run far deeper than COVID. She follows families across the country as they lived through the pandemic. But she also dives deep into the political history that brought us to this point: Why we have no childcare system to speak of, why subsidies for families were cut to the bone, how children became the group most likely to live in poverty, how we overpolice and separate families of color, and how we are content to let the unpaid and underpaid labor of women, especially women of color and immigrants, stand in for a void of public and collective concern for children.

Kamenetz makes the case that 2020 wasn’t a lost year–it was taken from our children, by years of neglect and bad faith. We have failed to put them first.

The Stolen Year is officially launched! Thanks to everyone who ordered and wrote a review or left a rating.

Excerpts/Pieces I wrote

New York Times Essay : School Is For Everyone

Washington Post column :

New York Times Well section piece : “How We Can Help Children Grow In The Wake Of A Crisis”

Atlantic excerpt : The Help That Never Came

Time magazine excerpt : What Grieving Children Need From the Grown-Ups in Their Lives

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