Book Reviews

American Childhoods by Joseph E. Illick: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002

Joseph E. Illick is Professor of History at San Francisco State University. We knew that he taught a course on the History of Childhood when he came to our training, because our own Case Supervisor, Maya Durrett, had taken it while she was an undergraduate. Now we see the fruits of his labors in book form, as American Childhoods. It will immediately go into our library and onto our reading lists as a valuable resource for volunteers.

Solomon's Sword: Two Families and the Children the State Took Away by Michael Shapiro, Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 2002

Solomon's Sword is uniquely useful for CASA volunteers in training, but will also be fascinating reading for anyone who has ever been an active volunteer. Michael Shapiro is a journalist rather than an attorney or social worker or psychologist. He had not had experience with the dependency court prior to his research for this project, so he comes to the project with a fresh but well informed point of view. He presents two specific cases, one from Connecticut and the other from Chicago, and includes very readable chapters that cover the history of child welfare practices and policies.

Savage Spawn: Reflections on Violent Children by Jonathan Kellerman New York: Ballantine Library of Contemporary Thought, 1999

Are you looking for a really clear, well-written and well-informed book about violence in children? Then this is the book to read.

Jonathan Kellerman is a psychologist who has become a well-known novelist, specializing in crime stories. He knows kids like these, from professional experience. He has strong opinions, and he expresses them clearly. He is not afraid to talk about evil. He can use a formal diagnostic term, but also stay in touch with lived, human experience.

The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures by Anne Fadiman: Farrar Straus & Giroux, 1998

Thanks to SFCASA Volunteers Alan Burkett and Mary McAllister for recommending one of the finest books I have read in recent years: The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures by Anne Fadiman. Mary wrote: “This is the true story of a Hmong child who was caught in the middle of the American medical system and her culture. Its morale is that one culture cannot judge what’s best for another culture. It is extremely well-written and quite non-judgmental of everyone involved.”

The Romance of Risk: Why Teenagers Do the Things They Do by Lynn E. Ponton, M.D., New York: Basic Books, 1997

Lynn Ponton is a psychiatrist at the University of California Medical Center at San Francisco. Her career has been spent helping distressed teens and their families. She is particularly interested in risk-taking behaviors and why young people are so fascinated with them. The Romance of Risk presents the stories of thirteen of her patients, all teenagers who were doing dangerous things, including running away, cutting, starving, drinking, taking drugs, fighting, and having unprotected sex. Most of the young people learned to understand why they were taking such unhealthy risks and started living safer lives. Many of them worked out the troubles they had been having in their relationships with their parents.

Orphan Trains: The Story of Charles Loring Brace and the Children He Saved and Failed by Stephen O’Connor (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2001)

As a CASA volunteer, you know that the system sometimes seems to perpetuate abuse and neglect rather than truly save children. Reading Orphan Trains will remind you that, however bad things may be now, they were worse in the past. We may have a terrible shortage of foster parents, and many of those who do take in our children may seem to be ill prepared to do the job, but the fact is that they are all screened, trained and supervised. It has not always been so.

Nobody’s Children: Abuse and Neglect, Foster Drift, and the Adoption Alternative Elizabeth Bartholet Boston, Beacon Press, 1999

Elizabeth Bartholet is a professor at Harvard Law School who specializes in issues involving child welfare and adoption. Nobody’s Children is a well-written and well-informed book, as well as an extremely controversial one.

If you are looking for a very clear description of the history and politics of child welfare, you will find it here. Bartholet brings the trends and laws right up to 1999, through the swing of the pendulum towards Family Preservation and away. In fact, this book breaks with the favored welfare theories of the 1990s. Bartholet questions the wisdom of leaving children with parents and kin and away from the interference of government welfare agencies. She supports policies that limit the time and energy invested in parents who do not demonstrate an ability to take care of their children.

Emotional Intelligence by Daniel Goleman

If you have not yet read Emotional Intelligence by Daniel Goleman, do so now, while you are a SFCASA Volunteer. This book is fascinating for all its information about emotions and the brain, but it is even more interesting for its revelations about people from distressed backgrounds who have not learned emotional intelligence in childhood. Does your CASA child seem really bright, but just doesn't do well in school? You might be interested to read about "impaired frontal cortex functioning" that can make emotionally stressed children impulsive, anxious, disruptive and likely to get into trouble "not because their intellect is deficient, but because their control over their emotional life is impaired. The emotional brain, quite separate from those cortical areas tapped by IQ tests, controls rage and compassion alike. These emotional circuits are sculpted by experience throughout childhood—and we leave those experiences utterly to chance at our peril." (pg. 27)

WASTED: The Plight of America's Unwanted Children by Patrick T. Murphy Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1997

Patrick T. Murphy is an attorney who has spent much of his career defending abused and neglected children in the Juvenile Courts of Chicago. As he says in his Foreward, "my story is a bleak one, and it does not have a happy ending."

The Broken Cord by Michael Dorris (New York: Harper Collins, 1989)

The Broken Cord was the first book to describe Fetal Alcohol Syndrome and Fetal Alcohol Effect for the general public when it was published in 1989. The author, Michael Dorris, was a single man when he adopted a little boy who turned out to have serious behavioral, emotional, and developmental problems. Little by little, Dorris started to realize that his son, called Adam in the book, was not as singular as he had thought. Many children, particularly many Native American children, shared his problems. Dorris discovered that many of these children even shared a striking physical resemblance to Adam. They all suffered from the same affliction, FAS, a syndrome produced by the toxic effects that alcohol has on the developing brain and body of a child in the womb.

Mother Nature: Maternal Instincts and How They Shape the Human Species Sarah Blaffer Hardy (New York: Ballentine Books, 1999)

The blurb on the cover of the paperback edition of Sara Blaffer Hardy's 700+ page (including extensive bibliography and footnotes) book accurately calls this "a truly monumental work, as elegant as it is insightful." If you are looking for a fascinating, intelligent, provocative, and well-researched book, you need look no farther. Hardy writes about motherhood, childrearing, instincts, family and cultural influences on development, biology, anthropology—and life!

A Child Called 'It': An Abused Child's Journey from Victim to Victor Dave Pelzer, Health Communications

A Child Called 'It' is a first-person narrative of a severely abused child who has survived to tell his tale. Dave Pelzer tells his story to help others heal from the trauma of the past.

A Child's Journey Through Placement Vera I. Fahlberg, M.D. (Indianapolis, IN: Perspectives Press, 1991)

A Child’s Journey Through Placement is virtually a textbook on the psychology of foster children for CASA volunteers. Written for child welfare workers, this book clearly describes the importance of attachment and the impact of separation and loss on children at each stage of their lives. Its chapter on child development discusses the impact of each stage on the parents and other caregivers as well as the child.

Amazing Grace: The Lives of Children and the Conscience of a Nation Jonathan Kozol (NY: Harper Perennial, 1996)

If you only read one book about the lives of children growing up in poverty in urban America, let it be Jonathan Kozol's Amazing Grace. This is an unpretentious book. The author writes in a clear and graceful style about his visits to the South Bronx and to Harlem. He describes the trip to the South Bronx:"When you enter the train (in Manhattan), you are in the seventh richest congressional district in the nation. When you leave, you are in the poorest." (pg. 3)

Angela's Ashes Frank McCourt (New York: Scribner, 1996)

Angela's Ashes is simply and purely one of the most moving and beautiful books about abused and neglected children that you can read. Frank McCourt describes his childhood in America and Ireland with an extraordinary mixture of compassion and dispassion. He will show you how to stay emotionally open and completely honest at the same time, and how to describe conditions of neglect and abuse without dehumanizing the perpetrators or the victims.

Lost Boys: Why our Sons Turn Violent and How We Can Save Them James Garbarino, Ph.D.New York: The Free Press 1999

Do you want to learn more about boys who commit violent acts? James Garbarino is a psychologist who has spent years getting to know such boys.

Reclaiming our Chidlren

Breggin MD, Peter R.  Perseus Publishing 2001

Parents and other adults are the source of the problem with troubled children--not the "child monsters" whose mug shots we see on the evening news for school shootings, murders, and other tales of modern-day juvenile delinquency. That's the case made by Peter R. Breggin, a Maryland-based psychiatrist who has written widely on the overuse of psychoactive drug; in Reclaiming Our Children he takes aim at what he considers the root of all the trouble: today's families. Overly permissive parents, absentee fathers, working mothers, disconnected families--they all take the blame in Breggin's well-reasoned argument for renewing the importance of children in our lives.

Angelhead

Bottoms, Greg: Crown Publishers 2000

One of the most harrowing portraits of madness in recent memory, Bottoms's memoir documents the unraveling of his older brother in skillful, off-center prose. The chaosAof mental deterioration, family denial, God obsession and terrorAbegins in the 1980s, in the Bottomses' suburban home in Tidewater, Va. Fourteen-year-old Michael, high on LSD, believes he sees the face of God and briefly descends into a psychotic fit. From there, Bottoms follows his brother's fall from sanity in a series of... read more

I Speak For This Child

 Courter, Gay: Backinprint.com 2001

In I Speak For This Child, best-selling novelist Gay Courter recounts her experiences as a Guardian ad Litem, a volunteer court-appointed advocate for children involved in Florida’s court system. Following her first tentative approach to her local Court Appointed Special Advocates program to her more determined efforts, we get an insider’s glimpse on this hidden world and learn what it takes to ensure that America’s most vulnerable citizens are treated with care and respect. Courter’s story is both heartbreaking and heartwarming, and is an inspiration for anyone who has ever looked up from a newspaper and wondered, “What can I do to help?”

Ghosts from the Nursery

 Karr-Morse, R. & Wiley, M.: Atlantic Monthly Press 1991

As groundbreaking as Rachel Carson's "Silent Spring, Ghosts from the Nursery" presents startling evidence on how abuse and neglect during the first two years of life is creating a tide of violent youth.

A Man Named Dave: A Story of Triumph and Forgiveness

 Pelzer, D. : Plume Books 2000

These words were Dave Pelzer's declaration of independence to his mother, and they represented the ultimate act of self-reliance. Dave's father never intervened as his mother abused him with shocking brutality, denying him food and clothing, torturing him in any way she could imagine. This was the woman who told her son she could kill him any time she wanted to-and nearly did. The more than two million readers of Pelzer's previous international bestsellers, A Child Called "It" and The Lost Boy, know that he lived to tell his courageous story. A Man Named Dave is the gripping conclusion to his inspirational trilogy. With stunning generosity of spirit, Dave Pelzer invites readers on his journey to discover how he turned shame into pride and rejection into acceptance.

The Lost Boy: A Foster Child’s Search for the Love of a Family

 Pelzer, D. : Health Communications 1997

"The Lost Boy" is the harrowing but ultimately uplifting true story of a boy's journey through the foster-care system in search of a family to love. This is Dave Pelzer's long-awaited sequel to "A Child Called "It". The Lost Boy" is Pelzer's story--a moving sequel and inspirational read for all.

The Second Family

 Raffel, R. : St. Martins Griffin 2002

Twenty-five years as a counselor did not prepare Taffel (Nurturing Good Children Now) to deal with this country's latest generation of teenagers. In this eye-opening work, he tracks adolescents' defection from the "first family" (Mom, Dad, and siblings) for the "second family" (the peer group and pop culture). This is not, he argues, an angry or rebellious culture but a comfort-seeking one be it with sex, drugs, recreation, body sculpture, and consumer items. Taffel is at his best explaining why... read more