Reseñas proporcionadas por Syndetics
Library Journal Review
Rank, an associate professor at Washington University's George Warren Brown School of Social Work, believes that there will always be a need for public assistance but that the amount could be greatly minimized through a concerted effort to create jobs and good training programs; assure quality universal healthcare and accessible, affordable child care; reduce unwanted pregnancies; and make a positive investment in communities and services. Rank's ten-year study of public welfare, which included interviews with recipients, data sampling, research, and field work, convinced him that welfare clients share the same beliefs and values as the rest of us, do not aspire to the dole, and find themselves dependent because they lack such things as financial resources, marketable job skills, and reliable medical help. Enhanced by an appendix on methodology, this cogent, readable work is recommended for academic, professional, and informed general readers.-Suzanne W. Wood, SUNY Coll. of Technology, Alfred (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
CHOICE Review
Rank persuasively demolishes or, at the least, seriously undermines popular myths concerning welfare recipients, their motives, attitudes, and behaviors. Myths, such as the belief that recipients are lazy or that single women bear children to increase benefits, have, lamentably, been central in the creation and maintenance of the existing welfare system. In reality, a sizable minority of welfare recipients are working, at least part time, and most of those not working who are capable of doing so want to work. For most, the welfare system does not undermine the work ethic as is popularly believed. And it is not true that increased AFDC benefits for additional children constitute an incentive for women on welfare to bear more children. In fact, women on welfare have lower fertility rates than women generally. Rank skillfully uses a triangular methodology--interviews with families receiving public assistance, a longitudinal sample of about 3,000 welfare families, and fieldwork in the welfare system--to critique these and other myths and to develop his own explanation of welfare recipiency. He concludes by making a series of rather specific policy suggestions that would reduce poverty and the need for public assistance. This readable, mostly nontechnical book is recommended to all with an interest in poverty and welfare issues, and most particularly, to policy makers and those who inform them. All levels. K. Hadden; University of Connecticut
Booklist Review
Welfare is a complicated subject, and alternative welfare policies can be assessed well only by citizens who know how complicated it is. So we need scholarly--i.e., deeply informed--books on welfare, but such books often bore nonscholarly readers. Answering the questions, Why do people turn to welfare? What is it like to survive on welfare? and How can America improve its welfare delivery? Rank strives manfully, and to some extent successfully, to reach both scholar and general reader. Since his research base is restricted to a single rural, mostly white Wisconsin county, Rank doesn't convince us he has something to teach about inner-city welfare, but what he does teach, he teaches convincingly, ably marrying statistics and accounts of recipients' daily lives that would delight any old-fashioned realistic novelist. Furthermore, an illuminating historical chapter on U.S. and English welfare policies forcefully impresses upon us their cyclical nature; Clinton-like job retraining programs were first recommended in eighteenth-century London, and they didn't work. Well, maybe they were ahead of their time--and maybe not. ~--Roland Wulbert
