Hope's Boy: A Memoir

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.