Reviewed by Suzi Steffen

Near the beginning of The Lost Children of Wilder, Nina Bernstein writes that along the Hudson River, ocean tides control the current far upstream. "Over long stretches," she writes, "for every eight miles that the current’s ebb and tide carry a fallen tree branch downriver, the flood tide pushes it back up as much as seven miles."

The child welfare system in New York City acts like the Hudson River. This system, once dominated by Catholic and Jewish charities, barely served the needs of white children, leaving African-American kids — especially Protestants — to tough it out in poorly-funded public institutions.

One of those children was Shirley Wilder, a young African-American girl abused and abandoned to the system, who became pregnant at 14 while in foster care. Bernstein wrote a series of articles on Wilder in the New York Newsday in the early 1990s and in the process came to know not only Shirley, but also her son Lamont, who also grew up in foster care. Bernstein interweaves their dramatic stories with the complex tale of the lawsuit brought against the city on Shirley Wilder’s behalf. Over the twenty-seven years the book covers, the case winds downriver, swept on by the gutsy fighters for equality, pushed back by the forces determined to keep giving public money to often discriminatory private institutions.

Bernstein keeps the dramatic story moving and writes sympathetically about all of the many complex characters involved in the Wilder lawsuit and in the Wilders' lives. But the book could hardly be more depressing. In the end, New York’s system appears full of greed, violence, abuse and pain, and the Wilders’ lives reflect this institutional neglect.

Can legal fights alter great injustices? Bernstein might answer that the tide of change is slow -— and the fallen branch may well be drowned by the time the river reaches the sea.