Hope's Boy: A Memoir

by Andrew Bridge Narrated by David Drummond

Overview

When Andrew Bridge was seven years old, he and his mother-a mentally unstable woman who loved her child more than she could care for him-slid deeper and deeper into poverty, until they were reduced to scavenging for food in trash bins. Welfare officials did little more than threaten to take Andrew away, until a social worker arrived with a police escort and did just that while his mother screamed on the sidewalk. And so began Andrew's descent into the foster care system-"care" being a terrible irony, as he received almost none for the next eleven years.



Academic achievement was Andrew's ticket out of hell-a scholarship to Wesleyan University led to Harvard Law School and a Fulbright Scholarship. Now an accomplished adult, he has dedicated his life to working on behalf of the frightened children still lost in the system. Hope's Boy is his story, a story of endurance and the power of love and, most of all, of hope.

Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly

In this memoir of a decade spent in foster care, Bridge illuminates the horrors of a system that, in its clumsy attempts to save children, he argues, all too frequently condemns them to physical and emotional abuse. The child of a teenage mother who divorced her abusive husband soon after Bridge was born, he watched helplessly as his mother disintegrated under the impact of isolation and poverty. At the age of seven, Bridge was dragged away from his mother, literally, by police and warehoused in an enormous California juvenile facility patrolled by armed guards. The state eventually transferred him to a foster family dominated by an obese, bullying Estonian woman who had survived imprisonment in Dachau as a child. At 17, as he prepared to leave foster care for college and freedom, Bridge finally had a reunion with the mother he never stopped missing. In his narration of this unending nightmare, Bridge shows particular skill in portraying his isolation and the defenses he constructed to survive it. He also has a talent for grotesques, particularly that of the monstrous foster mother who revisited the misery of her upbringing on her foster children. Bridge's obsessive focus on his loneliness and his two "mothers" is so intense that a more balanced picture of his life fails to emerge and his attachment to another foster child remains unexplained. Yet Bridge, a Harvard Law School graduate who has devoted his career to children's rights, has provided remarkable insights into a dark corner of American society. (Feb.)

Copyright 2007 Reed Business Information

Product Details

BN ID:	2940170744008
Publisher:	Tantor Audio
Publication date:	02/19/2008
Edition description:	Unabridged

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