Myth Of The Welfare King Analysis

Myth of the Welfare Queen, by David Zucchino. Simon & Schuster: ¬New York, New York, 1999. 366 pages. Reviewed by Emily White.

David Zucchino is a former Los Angeles Times correspondent as well as a Pulitzer Prize winning author in 1995 for his feature writing in South Africa. He received an education at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and has since been travelling to dozens of nations reporting on social issues on a global scale, recently focused on Afghanistan, Libya and Iraq, some of those pieces being when he was the foreign editor for The Philadelphia Inquirer. With his remaining time, he has written two well-known books, Thunder Run and, Myth of the Welfare Queen, both true counts of social problems viewed up close.

When writing Myth of the Welfare Queen, David Zucchino exposes the lives of two women who are honestly using the American welfare system in the hopes that families across the

The myth of “Welfare Queens” is quickly debunked watching Odessa trying to support her four grandchildren on $400 a month and Cheri trying to raise a child and organize a welfare rights group while being unpaid. Odessa Williams, once on welfare in the 60’s, was only allotted $25 more a week for having to feed four other children. That little amount of money is clearly not enough to maintain a household and Odessa results to trash picking as a way to cut down on a shopping budget. On page 64, Zucchino depicts what the typical person receiving welfare benefits looks like—it certainly is not the image Ronald Reagan and the media feeds to the American people. In the state of Pennsylvania, only 32% of recipients were black while 57% were white. The passage describes those using the program AFDC (Aid to Families with Dependent