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The Washington Monthly's 2004 Annual Political Book Award winner
Washington Monthly, April, 2005
American Dream: Three Women,Ten Kids, and a Nation's Drive to End Welfare by Jason Deparle Viking Books, 2004
For three decades, this magazine has held out hope for a generation of "new Dickinses": non-fiction writers who can extract literature from the lives of the poor and combine a novelist's touch with a penetrating eye for policy. We've seen few better examples of this kind of writing than Jason DeParle's exacting, funny, wrenching book, American Dream: Three Women, Ten Kids, and a Nation's Drive to End Welfare, the best piece of poverty journalism in many years. The book follows three welfare moms, Angie Jobe, Opal Caples, and Jewell Reed as they navigate seven years of life after welfare reform in Milwaukee, whose program had been considered a national model-interspersing their story with the tale of the Washington fight over welfare reform, which DeParle followed up close as The New York Times' poverty correspondent. DeParle's judicious, sensitive eye picks apart the pathologies of life in the ghetto and the minute failings of programs that have undermined the government's promise of alleviating the problems of poverty, while remaining essentially upbeat about the prospect of improving the ghettos, one of America's next great moral challenges.
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