The Queen: The Forgotten Life Behind an American Myth Paperback – Illustrated, April 14, 2020

I received a galley copy of this book because I know the author. It's as good as you've (hopefully) heard. You've perhaps also heard the basics: the story Levin tells is about Linda Taylor, the woman on whom the political trope of the "welfare queen" was based.What I so enjoyed was how deftly the book tells, essentially, two parallel stories: the political one, which is about the cynical use of a racist trope to further the electoral chances and domestic political agenda of Ronald Reagan and the Reagan-era GOP -- this story has all the carelessness about factuality and dog-whistling and dubious claims one might expect of a mainstream American politician at this point (or that point. whatever. you get it).And the second story, which is the true crime story of what Linda Taylor actually was and did which is both sad and totally bonkers. It's hard to talk about this book without a phrase like "welfare fraud turned out to be the least of her crimes": not only is that definitely true, but the nature, extent, and...existential depth of her criminal nature is breathtaking (in a bad way). With crisp prose that's even occasionally funny, Levin unearths Taylor's lifelong string of lies and of victims -- people she took advantage of with theft, identity fraud, and perhaps much much worse...by all accounts apparently throughout her whole life.The book also delicately threads a tough needle: it presents the ways in which Taylor herself was victimized--most specifically by racial and gender bias, including with her own family--without ever letting its acknowledgment of these facts mitigate the toll her crimes took on her victims or the portrait of her as a dangerous sociopath that ultimately emerges.This makes the book a bit bigger than either of its two--already big--stories. It's a sad book; it's an exciting book, and an 'easy' read in a good sense in that it zips along. But it's sad because it's about lying and the low place of truth in our lives; it's about the awful costs that bias and entrenched inequalities have exacted on people in this country since forever; it's about victimization in our society. It's an exciting, strange read of a story that feels like an 'outlier' narrative (and indeed, is a pretty wild narrative) but that--for me--was anchored in a melancholy reflection on all the ways we can be bad.I can't recommend the thing highly enough.

If you grew up in the US in the 1970s, you may remember Ronald Reagan’s first run for the presidency in 1976, during which he frequently referred to a “welfare queen” living in Chicago, who gamed the system such that she had numerous houses, cars, fur coats, etc., etc., all the proceeds of fraud on the federal welfare system. Well, “The Queen” is that woman’s story - going by the name Linda Taylor, she actually had some 10 or 12 aliases, not to mention numerous birth dates, parents, children, husbands, living situations and races. In reality, she was born in 1926 in the US South, the product of a white woman and black man (whose sexual union was literally illegal at the time). Because of her mixed race, her family largely rejected her, and she grew up all over the southern part of the country, with various family and non-family members and very little (if any) education. Her life of crime began long before the 1970s, when she was identified and prosecuted as a welfare cheat, charges that eventually led to her incarceration for a little over two years; but she may also have been a kidnapper, a bigamist, an “ordinary” thief (of other peoples’ property) and, not least, a murderer. Journalist Josh Levin has waded through thousands of documents, all meticulously laid out in the notes and bibliography sections of this book - indeed, in my Kindle edition I discovered that I still had some 20% of the book left to read when the story was done, that last 20% of the volume being devoted to sources and thank-yous. A really fascinating tale, rather heartbreaking when you think about this woman’s life, utterly impoverished in terms of human contact, love and acceptance - no wonder she felt entitled to take what she wanted, as she’d been deprived of so much. Recommended.

I am working on a painting called Welfare Queen. The painting is meant to be an statement about the pernicious myth. I thought that if I am making the painting I ought to read the story.Wow. I am blown away. What a powerful story about Linda Taylor as an individual and also about America's obsession with wanting to place the blame and burden for poverty on the poor.It's remarkable just how abused and discarded Linda Taylor was. It's hard not to see how her descent into deceit, fraud, kidnapping and murder was not caused by the unimaginable abuse and neglect she suffered at the hands of her family and her community.While it's important to understand the context and background, Levin makes it very clear that Taylor was as abject and pitiable as she was irredeemable and vile. It is a remarkably complex personal story.Levin also captures the political and social context of this myth. He exposes how it elides the problems faced by the working poor, why welfare as it operates is ineffective and how the myth has been used to implement policies that have exacerbated the problem of poverty in America.I was stunned by the ending. I almost never write book reviews for books that I purchase on Amazon. However, this book deserves it. Sparkling research and documentation are woven into a riveting tale about modern America's obsession with one its most interesting and perplexing figures.