Books about Recipient from Amazon.com

In this definitive work, two-time Pulitzer finalist Jason DeParle cuts between the mean streets of Milwaukee and the corridors of Washington to produce a masterpiece of literary journalism. At the heart of the story are three cousins whose different lives follow similar trajectories. Leaving welfare, Angie puts her heart in her work. Jewell bets on an imprisoned man. Opal guards a tragic secret that threatens her kids and her life. DeParle traces their family history back six generations to slavery and weaves poor people, politicians, reformers, and rogues into a spellbinding epic.

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..
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This down-to-earth look at the welfare system provides readers with stories from welfare recipients themselves and from those who recently left welfare for work: how they got onto welfare, what the reality of welfare (and welfare reform) is for them, issues in raising their families, their plans, hopes, and dreams are for the future, and some of the struggles they face as they try to leave the welfare system. Welfare recipients who were interviewed by the author in Florida and Oregon share their perspectives on work requirements, family caps, time limits, and other features of the new welfare reform (TANF) program. They discuss the importance of a livable wage and health insurance in providing the needed security to leave welfare for good. These qualitative interviews are theoretically grounded, and supplemented with up-to-date statewide and national data on welfare reform and its consequences. The author says, "Underneath the political rhetoric and welfare statistics are real live human beings who are trying to make sense out of their lives." Their voices provide a crucial counterpoint to the politicians and policy "experts" who have shaped the policy reform initiative. They show us that the so-called welfare problem is related to the insecurity of low-tier work in the United States..
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This is a no-holds-barred response to the liberal and conservative retreat from an assertive, activist, and socially transformative civil rights agenda of recent years--using a black feminist lens and the issue of the impact of recent legislation, social policy, and welfare "reform" on black women's--especially poor black women's--control over their bodies' autonomy and their freedom to bear and raise children with respect and dignity in a society whose white mainstream is determined to demonize, even criminalize their lives. It gives its readers a cogent legal and historical argument for a radically new , and socially transformative, definition of "liberty" and "equality" for the American polity from a black feminist perspective.

The author is able to combine the most innovative and radical thinking on several fronts--racial theory, feminist, and legal--to produce a work that is at once history and political treatise. By using the history of how American law--beginning with slavery--has treated the issue of the state's right to interfere with the black woman's body, the author explosively and effectively makes the case for the legal redress to the racist implications of current policy with regards to 1) access to and coercive dispensing of birth control to poor black women 2) the criminalization of parenting by poor black women who have used drugs 3) the stigmatization and devaluation of poor black mothers under the new welfare provisions, and 4) the differential access to and disproportionate spending of social resources on the new reproductive technologies used by wealthy white couples to insure genetically related offspring.

The legal redress of the racism inherent in current American law and policy in these matters, the author argues in her last chapter, demands and should lead us to adopt a new standard and definition of the liberal theory of "liberty" and "equality" based on the need for, and the positive role of government in fostering, social as well as individual justice.
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Price: $9.22 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Hailed as a great success, welfare reform resulted in a dramatic decline in the welfare rolls--from 4.4 million families in 1996 to 2.1 million in 2001. But what does this "success" look like to the welfare mothers and welfare caseworkers who experienced it? In Flat Broke, With Children, Sharon Hays tells us the story of welfare reform from inside the welfare office and inside the lives of welfare mothers, describing the challenges that welfare recipients face in managing their work, their families, and the rules and regulations of welfare reform.
Welfare reform, experienced on the ground, is not a rosy picture. The majority of adult welfare clients are mothers--over 90 percent--and the time limits imposed by welfare reform throw millions of these mostly unmarried, desperate women into the labor market, where they must accept low wages, the most menial work, the poorest hours, with no benefits, and little flexibility. Hays provides a vivid portrait of their lives--debunking many of the stereotypes we have of welfare recipients--but she also steps back to explore what welfare reform reveals about the meaning of work and family life in our society. In particular, she argues that an inherent contradiction lies at the heart of welfare policy, which emphasizes traditional family values even as its ethic of "personal responsibility" requires women to work and leave their children in childcare or at home alone all day long.
Hays devoted three years to visiting welfare clients and two welfare offices, one in a medium-sized town in the Southeast, another in a large, metropolitan area in the West. Drawing on this hands-on research, Flat Broke, With Children is the first book to explore the impact of recent welfare reform on motherhood, marriage, and work in women's lives, and the first book to offer us a portrait of how welfare reform plays out in thousands of local welfare offices and in millions of homes across the nation..
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While welfare rolls have dramatically dropped across the United States during the last decade, the high poverty for mothers and their children has not. In fact many of new welfare reform initiatives pose increasingly negative effects on poor children and youth. As these startling statistics mount, federal and state governments continue to cut back on the very services and funds on which impoverished families rely.

This groundbreaking new book offers a history of welfare, an accurate portrayal of welfare recipients and an understanding of the relationship between race and welfare. Through detailed research and compelling interviews, award-winning author Ken Neubeck offers a unique comparison of other industrialized nation's welfare policies compared to ours, and presents a new argument for curtailing the end of welfare as we know it: the case for making economic human rights.

What civil rights was to the 1960s, human rights have become the movement of the 1990s and today. Just as many doctors have campaigned to have health considered a human right, Neubeck provocatively suggests that people should be entitled to economic human rights. When Welfare Disappears examines the important ways in which our government has refused to recognize these rights of its most impoverished and vulnerable citizens..
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This collection of moving black-and-white photographs of recipients of the Medal of Honour shows not the glory of war, but the underlying spirit and humanity of true heroism Forty-eight portraits are combined with comments, observations, and statements from the recipients of America's highest military honour. This compilation of words and pictures of men who served in the US Navy, Air Force, Army, and Marine Corps is both humbling and poignant. Their actions and lives vary as much as the conflicts (World War II, Korea, and Vietnam) and include a conscientious objector who never wielded a weapon and a man known as the 'Last Eagle', as he was the last World War II pilot to retire. Each recipient's full official citation is included in the appendix..
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Both "bureaucracy" and "bureaucrats" have taken on a pejorative hue over the years, but does the problem lie with those on the "street-level" - those organizations and people the public deals with directly - or is it in how they are managed? Norma Riccucci knows that management matters, and she addresses a critical gap in the understanding of public policy by uniquely focusing on the effects of public management on street-level bureaucrats. How Management Matters examines not only how but where public management matters in government organizations. Looking at the 1996 welfare reform law (the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, or PRWORA), Riccucci examines the law's effectiveness in changing the work functions and behaviors of street-level welfare workers from the role of simply determining eligibility of clients to actually helping their clients find work. She investigates the significant role of these workers in the implementation of welfare reform, the role of public management in changing the system of welfare under the reform law, and management's impact on results - in this case ensuring the delivery of welfare benefits and services to eligible clients. Over a period of two years, Riccucci traveled specifically to eleven different cities and, from interviews and a large national survey, she gathered quantitative results from cities in such states as New York, Texas, Michigan, and Georgia, that were selected because of their range of policies, administrative structures, and political cultures. General welfare data for all fifty states is included in this rigorous analysis, demonstrating to all with an interest in any field of public administration or public policy that management does indeed matter..
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The honored few...From the bloody fields of the Civil War to the global conflicts of the modern age, here are the stories of 100 Army Medal of Honor winners

Since its Revolution-era formation as the Continental Army, the United States Army has earned a hard-won reputation for duty, courage, and brotherhood. But there are those whose exploits in combat have set them apart from their fellow soldiers, earning them the most cherished and honored citation there is-the Congressional Medal of Honor.

From the killing fields of the Civil War, through World Wars I and II, to the jungles of Vietnam and America's fight against terrorism around the world, this comprehensive book features detailed information on 100 Army Corps Medal of Honor winners-including many lesser-known recipients- whose courage and sacrifice in the service of their country remain the foundations of the United States Army. Their achievements are chronicled in this complete and compelling memorial of those who have earned the right to be called "The Bravest of the Brave.".
Price: $6.94 [Notify me when price goes down.]