The author, a professor at the Graduate School of Social Work and Social Policy at Bryn Mawr College, has provided a wise and passionate critique of the welfare system in the United States. This is a scholarly treatise which, although replete with empirical evidence, speaks in compelling terms to the real-life dilemmas which effect the poor in our society. Professor Schram makes a convincing argument that the legislative reform of recent years has harmed a significant segment of the society which it was ostensibly designed to benefit, and any advances must be viewed through a politically skewed prism. His analysis of the 'work to welfare' programs is particularly astute, and demonstrates how partisan politics are, and always have been, a driving force in the development of welfare policy.

I highly recommend this book to all who, like myself, are interested in a critical, scholarly and yet impassioned examination of welfare reform and its effect on American society. As an attorney who deals with human rights, immigration and the condition of the politically disenfranchised, I found this book to be an invaluable resource. It is an indispensable addition to any library.

Christine M. Flowers

The events of 1968 serve as the backdrop for this well-written but accessible novel about a young southerner looking for a missing friend and finding himself. Sanford takes his protagonist, a country dj named Cal, from a small-town Mississippi River town to springtime Daytona Beach, then up the East Coast to a Cambridge crash pad and a summer romance in Boston, and finally to the Chicago convention with a group of militant anti-war demonstrators. The chapters on the Chicago riots are especially well wrought, but every scene has the true feel of the 60s counterculture. Cal's search for the younger brother of his war-casualty best friend mirrors his personal quest for purpose and identity. A remarkable book.

Richard Sanford's Long Time Gone is a superbly written novel set in America's turbulent year of 1968. The search for a missing heir involves an unlikely cast, from the ghost of a best friend to a Buddhist from Detroit, to a girl-woman soulmate. A fictional memoir to the revolutionary changes of a bygone era, Long Time Gone is an enthralling and highly recommended tale, just the kind of novel that is so easy to pick up and so hard to put down!

A mesmerizing porthole into a time of turbulence and change. Readers cannot help but experience their own metamorphoses as they follow Cal's journey across America, through the sixties, and into himself. Sanford shows a true passion and genius for the art of fiction--for his fiction truly is art. Whether you choose to see the book as the story of an intriguing character finding his own space in time, or a road map through the altering perspective of a pivotal decade, you cannot help but be touched by the literary beauty that is Long Time Gone.