The Washington Monthly's 2004 Annual Political Book Award winner.

• Position: American Dream: Three Women, Ten Kids, and a Nation's Drive to End Welfare - Brief Article - Book Review

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...