American Dream: Three Women, Ten Kids, and a Nation's Drive to End Welfare
by Jason DeParle

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Book Reviews of American Dream: Three Women, Ten Kids, and a Nation's Drive to End Welfare

Book Review: three women ten kids book
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Summary of American Dream: Three Women, Ten Kids, and a Nation's Drive to End Welfare

With a vivid sense of humanity, DeParle demonstrates that although we live in a country where anyone can make it, generation after generation some families don't. To read American Dream is to understand why.

The three compelling women at the heart of DeParle's narrative are vastly different temperamentally, yet they share the abstract qualities of strength and endurance, as well as extended family ties. DeParle paints their portraits with respect and sensitivity, and he provides a marvelous family history that reveals how "the story of welfare" is painfully "tangled in the story of race." Our glimpse at these difficult lives and the forces that profoundly shape them inspire an equal measure of hope and disappointment, and a large measure of outrage. As these remarkably resilient women struggle to raise their families, corruption is exposed in the very offices charged with implementing the newly adopted reforms. DeParle accepts that removing nine million women and children from the welfare rolls represents enormous progress. However, he simultaneously recognizes that we are dismally failing to confront a consequence of welfare reform: a new class of working poor. --Silvana Tropea

General Books

• Nonfiction > Current Events > Poverty
• Social Services & Welfare
• Politics > General