Turning Stones
From AwardAnnals
| Book: | Turning Stones: My Days and Nights with Children at Risk |
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| Author: | Marc Parent |
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| Publisher: | Ballantine Books |
These are the heroes of Marc Parent’s Turning Stones, small and unsuspecting victims of a society, and of a bureaucracy, that do not know what to do with them.
For three years, Marc Parent was a respected caseworker in New York City’s Emergency Children’s Services, a city agency created to investigate cases of abused children during the evening and nighttime hours. Parent applied himself to his work with devotion, and in his tiny charges he saw day-to-day bravery as well as some of the strangest twists the human soul can suffer. Eventually, however, Parent discovered what a thin line separates any of us from tragedy, especially when children are involved. Faced with the horror of a child’s death he ultimately, inspiringly, rediscovers the feeling of making a difference in our world—if only by turning one stone at a time. There are no prescriptions or policies here, only the lives of human beings in a fearsome world, told with vividness, humor, honesty, and deep sympathy.
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Reviews
Amazon.com
Marc Parent worked for four years as a caseworker for Emergency Children’s Services in New York, acting as the final protector of children from abusive parents, as “the one on the front line—the last hope for a kid in trouble.” His job was to make house calls and decide if a child needed to be removed at once. He has selected eight cases illustrating the extreme pressures of the work and indicating why it is that the system so often fails in its mission. He recounts unsparingly how three years into his job he made a fatal mistake, failing to recognize the plight of a little boy who later died of starvation. This compelling account is an important documenting of the weaknesses of the child support system.
