In 1995 the brutal slaying of Elisa Izquierdo by her crack-addicted mother seized headlines. Responding to the public's outrage that city officials had ignored obvious signs that the 6-year-old was being tortured at home, New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani declared that he was creating a new children's agency with a tough new executive in charge and adopting a stringent new policy of removing children from their homes at the first signs of danger.

Of course, Elisa Izquierdo was not the first child supposedly under the watch of authorities to die at the hands of her caretaker--there were twenty-six others in New York City in that year alone. But only when these gruesome stories make the nightly news do politicians step into the spotlight and announce innovative new policies as solutions to this newfound concern. In fact, abuse and neglect of children have always been with us, and the answer to the problem is neither new nor complicated.

The mid-nineteenth century might seem an unlikely place to embark on an exploration of the failings of modern child welfare. But in Orphan Trains: The Story of Charles Loring Brace and the Children He Saved and Failed, Stephen O'Connor reveals the value of tracing a dysfunctional system back to its troubled origins. By telling the story of the father of modern foster care, O'Connor illustrates how the haphazard amalgam of paltry efforts we today call a child-welfare "system" developed out of well-intentioned but frequently misguided notions about children, poverty and social responsibility.

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