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| The Lost Children of Wilder: The Epic Struggle to Change Foster Care | 
 enlarge | Author: Nina Bernstein
Publisher: Vintage
Category: Book
List Price: $15.95
Buy New: $7.99
You Save: $7.96 (50%)
Buy New/Used/Collectible from $4.98
Avg. Customer Rating:  (19 reviews)
Sales Rank: 388390
Languages: English (Original Language), English (Unknown), English (Published)
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 496
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.7
Dimensions (in): 7.9 x 5.2 x 1.2
ISBN: 0679758348
Dewey Decimal Number: 362.733097471
EAN: 9780679758341
ASIN: 0679758348
Publication Date: February 5, 2002
Release Date: February 5, 2002
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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| Editorial Reviews:
Product Description
IIn 1973, a young ACLU attorney filed a controversial class-action lawsuit that challenged New York City?s operation of its foster-care system. The plaintiff was an abused runaway named Shirley Wilder who had suffered from the system?s inequities. Wilder, as the case came to be known, was waged for two and a half decades, becoming a battleground for the conflicts of race, religion, and politics that shape America?s child-welfare system.
The Lost Children of Wilder gives us the galvanizing history of this landmark case and the personal story at its core. Nina Bernstein takes us behind the scenes of far-reaching legal and legislative battles, but she also traces the life of Shirley Wilder and her son, Lamont, born when Shirley was only fourteen and relinquished to the very system being challenged in her name. Bernstein?s account of Shirley and Lamont?s struggles captures the heartbreaking consequences of the child welfare system?s best intentions and deepest flaws. In the tradition of There Are No Children Here, this is a major achievement of investigative journalism and a tour de force of social observation, a gripping book that will haunt every reader who cares about the needs of children.
Amazon.com Review
At age 12, Shirley Wilder ran away from an abusive home and landed in New York City's foster-care system. By age 13, she was named the plaintiff in a class-action lawsuit that challenged the city's 150-year-old system as unconstitutional. At 14, Shirley gave birth to a son, Lamont, who was soon swept up in the same system. This absorbing account by New York Times reporter Nina Bernstein follows the threads of the tragic lives of Shirley and Lamont Wilder and the lawsuit that bears their name. In the process it illuminates the city's--and the nation's--dysfunctional social welfare system and its impact on the children it purportedly helps. The Wilder lawsuit was filed in 1973 by a passionate young lawyer who stuck by it through 26 years of litigation, without the case ever being fully resolved. The accusation: that New York City's system violated the First and Fourteenth Amendments for giving private religious agencies control of publicly financed foster-care beds. These mostly Catholic and Jewish agencies gave preference to white Catholic and Jewish children, while the growing numbers of black and Protestant children were sent to inappropriate institutions that left them with more problems than they had when they came. Such was the fate of Shirley, who, for lack of anywhere else to go, was placed in Hudson, a state reformatory for delinquents with no treatment services for abandoned or abused children. Hudson "looked like a camp from the outside and was unmistakably a prison within." There was rampant violence and sexual abuse, and girls were regularly punished by being put in "the hole," a 5-by-8-foot cell with no windows, furniture, or heat, which Shirley would later testify was like "Winter. Winter--all year round." But a case that named state and city officials, 77 voluntary agencies and their directors, and 84 individual defendants including nuns, rabbis, and clergymen, and that threatened to pit blacks and Jews against each other, was a case destined to enter a legal wilderness of avoidance and delay. Shirley and Lamont's unforgettable stories reveal the deep fault lines in a system that often does more harm than good. While reforms come and go with little success, Bernstein makes clear that the child welfare system will never really change until there is a coming to terms with the system's place as "a political battleground for abiding national conflicts over race, religion, gender and inequality" and the "unacknowledged contradictions between policies that punish the 'undeserving poor' and pledge to help all needy children." --Lesley Reed
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| Customer Reviews: Read 14 more reviews...
 Sometimes There Is No Light At The End of the Tunnel January 30, 2008
There's one word to describe this book: depressing. That doesn't mean you shouldn't read The Lost Children of Wilder, but it's so upsetting that the story will stay with you long after you've finished reading the book. In some true stories, you have the expectation of hope, even a small sliver, that things will get better. Without giving away the very moving details of the rest of Shirley Wilder's story, let me say that the story on page one is nothing compared to how sad her life becomes later on in the book, and the outrage you'll feel reading the first few chapters will not prepare you for how sad and angry the rest of her story will make you feel.
The anger isn't at Shirley Wilder or her child. The anger is for a child welfare and foster care system that was hopelessly broken then and is a thousand times worse today.
Ultimately, despite the groundbreaking class-action lawsuit, nothing changed, not for the tragic life of Shirley Wilder and her son. The system is just as broken today as it was thirty years ago.
Required Reading for All who work with homeless & homeless youth. February 21, 2007
This book gives you the nuts and bolts of the Wilder case. It also gives marevelous insight into the lives of youth in Foster Care. If you think you know how it all "goes down" for youth in these circumstances- read this book. This is a complex social issue that requires understanding at the individual level.
This is also great book to read for those "thinking" about a career in social work, etc.
The Wisdom to End Foster Care and Orphanages April 13, 2004
4 out of 5 found this review helpful
Once read, it might behoove caring persons to consider whether foster care and orphanages are proper environments for children whose parents are living, and whether even extended relatives are preferable to "kennel care" offered to humans, must less "sentenced" to them. In a modern age, if society cannot cope with the problems and the harms that occur with unwanted children, it's possible that we have been traveling down the wrong social path for some time. Examining the extent to which these environments are necessary, and damaging to children, it might be possible that alternative perspectives might provide solutions that are more family friendly, and salvage responsible, rather than to subject children to these emotionally detached and wrenching environments. It's possible we have been delusional for far too long in recognition of the fact that children are not as resilient as we tend to think they are, and that they were provided with two parents for that reason, because they need the protection, love and nurturing of parents, not just adult strangers. If we consider that it is unhealthy for mental health patients to be warehoused (if we can avoid it), why do we do it with children?
Notable August 30, 2003
The Lost Children of Wilder is a historic account of a person's plight to make changes. This book haunts me, because thirty years after the 1973 lawsuit the foster care system still has many changes to be made and the system is still allowing children to fall through the cracks and die. I cry for Shirley Wilder and Lamont. I cry and pray that as a social worker, I can make a difference and not allow children to fall through the cracks.
I'm thankful to Nina Bernstein for dedicating herself to writing a book of this magnitude. With an average 4 star rating, all that consider reading this book should take time away from their lives and read this heartbreaking, but truth be told, story of our nation's short falls.
Spellbinding and Depressing February 9, 2003
4 out of 4 found this review helpful
Nina Bernstein's compelling account of the generations of children trapped in the child welfare system kept me up late turning pages...and gave me nightmares of the thousands and thousands of children who are still churning through an overtaxed foster care system that our society doesn't seem to care about. Still almost every week there's another horror story of an abused or neglected kid that fell through the cracks of the "system."
This is an absolutely amazing, and realistic account, of what long-term public interest litigation is like. The world needs more people like Marcia Robinson Lowry to fight on behalf of kids, and more journalists like Nina Bernstein, willing to put under bright light the shortcomings that our local governments would rather have swept under the rug.
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