"A tour de force. All three authors are among the country's most prolific and insightful scholars of social policy, and together they have crafted a work of wide and ambitious scope, combining a superb and nuanced theoretical intensity with historical insight and skillfully amassed empirical evidence. One of the pleasures of engaging with this work of expansive vision and erudition is to encounter academic minds on their sharpest edge. That Soss, Fording, and Schram were able to shape and sculpt all the massive amounts of data into coherent, elegant chapters is a marvel of engaged and passionate scholarly dedication, and the ethos of their piece is as impressive as the content. Their research--historical, theoretical, and empirical--is impeccable, and breathtakingly they bring all the realms of research together, in the process forging laser-like insight into poverty governance in the contemporary moments of complexity. Both graduate students and faculty in a wide range of disciplines who wish to gain cultural literacy in understanding poverty, race, and its management need to treat this text as priority reading. It will become a classic in the way Piven and Cloward's Regulating the Poor did over forty years ago.".