Volume 48, Number 8 · May 17, 2001
Bleak House
By James Traub
The Lost Children of Wilder: The Epic Struggle to Change Foster Care
Nina Bernstein
Pantheon, 482 pp., $27.50
Foster care is one of those social institutions that never seem to hold public attention for long. We hear a lot about the schools, because our own children attend them. And we hear a lot about the welfare system and the criminal justice system and the drug treatment system, because welfare and crime and drugs take a toll on ordinary citizens, who thus have a stake in successful reform. Foster care might as well take place in another country. The children in the system, at least in places like New York City, are almost entirely poor and black or Hispanic, and their suffering poses no threat to the white middle class. Most of us would be hard-pressed to explain what 'the system' consists of, beyond the expression 'foster parents.' Every few years, a small child supposedly under the watchful eye of the city is killed in an unspeakable fashion, and we peer into the depths of something awful and apparently irremediable. And then we move on.
Review, 5080 words
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