The New Deal makes a somewhat awkward fit for this book, since it was a broad campaign against the anomalies of depression, not against the pathology of persistent poverty as such. But it did commit the Democrats to the virtues of government intervention, and so forecast Lyndon Johnson's War On Poverty. Patterson's narrative is somewhat discontinuous: in the lulls between legislative blockbusters, he turns away from politics to the social science of poverty. But perhaps that discontinuity reflects the disjunction between sociological expertise and political willpower over the course of America's most futile war.