NONFICTION - Oct. 24, 1993

FROM CRADLE TO GRAVE: The Human Face of Poverty in America by Jonathan Freedman. (Atheneum: $20; 244 pp.) Freedman’s columns on social issues have been featured in the Los Angles Times, the New York Times and the San Diego Tribune. In 1987, he won a Pulitzer prize for distinguished editorial writing. This book, in a slightly labored metaphor, is organized by “steps” in life’s staircase: from prenatal care to infancy, early childhood, childhood, adolescence, the family, midlife and retirement. It is an attempt to show, through individual stories, where pieces of the “railing” are missing, and how the poor in this country, 40% of whom are children, are allowed, quite literally, to stumble and fall. The interviews that Freedman conducts convince him that poverty is more often linked to psychological wounds, often the result of sexual abuse, than to economic and social factors. Each chapter is full of success stories and good ideas, from community-based child development programs to a national system of child support that would deduct payments directly from absent parent’s wages, to Citizen’s Advice Bureaus to job training programs to hospice care for the elderly.