A critically acclaimed reporter for The New York Times provides an in-depth study of the conflict between government social policy and the realities of life in post-welfare America, focusing on the lives of three women in a single extended family. 35,000 first printing. More than a decade after presidential candidate Bill Clinton floated the idea of ending "welfare as we know it," the changes to the system have become so accepted and entrenched that it is difficult to remember the heated controversy surrounding the issue of reform. Jason DeParle, a social policy reporter for The New York Times , forcefully brings the subject to life in American Dream , a moving and informed examination of the challenges, complexities, successes, and failures involved in fixing our nation's ailing welfare system. Tracing the lives of three women and their children as legislative changes are pushed through Washington and the state of Wisconsin, DeParle puts an extraordinarily human face on a subject that is too often prone to ideological oversimplification. As DeParle adeptly shows, their story "of adversity variously overcome, compounded, or merely endured ... embodies the story of welfare writ large." 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 In the years after 1996, when President Clinton signed welfare-reform legislation, nine million women and children left the country's welfare rolls. Though the exodus was applauded in Washington, the story of exactly how these families were faring remained, in DeParle's words, a "national mystery." DeParle spent these years in Milwaukee, welfare reform's unofficial capital, studying the lives of three former welfare mothers: Jewell, Opal, and Angie. The narrative pans across generations of poverty—the women's grandparents sharecropped cotton—while, in the present, results vary. Opal tumbles into crack addiction, but the others struggle ahead, ultimately earning nine and ten dollars an hour as nursing assistants; Angie even joins a 401(k) plan. They are welfare-reform "successes," but their lives remain precarious. When there isn't enough money, lights are turned off and children go hungry. "Just treading water," Angie says, surveying her progress. "Just making it, that's all." Copyright © 2005 The New Yorker Bill Clinton promised to "end welfare as we know it" and launched a reform program that cast millions of women and children into tentative independence. New York Times reporter DeParle provides an absorbing look at three women, Angie, Jewell, and Opal, as they move from Chicago to Milwaukee, lured by higher benefits and lower living costs, only to confront the upheaval of the welfare system. DeParle doesn't stop at the usual exploration of welfare and urban policy. He traces the common heritage of the three women back six generations and connects the social conditions of urban poverty to southern sharecropping of the 1930s, when circumstances mirrored those of the welfare underclass even before there was a welfare program. DeParle also examines the political and commercial interests at stake. But he is most compelling in his portrayal of the personal struggle of these women and their children to carve out lives for themselves in the midst of uncertainty and in the face of tremendous obstacles. An important book for the public and for policymakers. Vanessa Bush Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved ...courageous and deeply disturbing... -- New York Times Book Review Exhaustively researched and eloquently reported a significant book clear headed, deeply sensitive and richly informative. -- San Jose Mercury News People for and against welfare reform "often read evidence selectively. DeParle's new book, American Dream, offers a powerful, bracing antidote. -- Los Angeles Times "Jason DeParle's American Dream is a singular achievement. He interweaves a fascinating discussion of the politics of the welfare reform movement with a poignant portrayal of the lives of three women in one extended family who move on and o