NONFICTION - July 4, 1993

TYRANNY OF KINDNESS by Theresa Funicello (Atlantic Monthly Press: $23.; 340 pp.). Theresa Funicello started out a welfare mother in 1973 and ended up a welfare activist, which means that this book about the welfare system in this country rolls along at a furious, smart pace, informed both by research and a first-hand knowledge of welfare’s inequities. Funicello was lucky enough to be out of luck in New York, where she found the Downtown Welfare Advocate Center, an activist group founded by Anita Hoffman, among others, who had found herself abandoned by her friends when Abbie Hoffman’s decision to go underground left her alone with a young child and out of money. Funicello came to understand that the problems she was having with welfare were problems inherent in the system, not proof of her humiliating failure at life. From there she began to help other welfare mothers, and eventually to work to reform the entire system--which, she charges, tends to make money for the middle-class middlemen who keep it going, rather than for the families who need help. An impassioned, intelligent appraisal of a decent idea gone bad. Funicello’s prose can get a bit overwrought at times, but that’s what righteous indignation can do.