The Children Who Grow Up in 'Book Deserts'In many high-poverty urban neighborhoods, it’s nearly impossible for a poor child to find something to read in the summer. Forty-five million. That’s how many words a typical child in a white-collar family will hear before age 4. The number is striking, not because it’s a lot of words for such a small human—the vast majority of a person’s neural connections, after all, are formed by age 3—but beca
