Andrew Bridge's life against the odds

"Please, don't hurt her.

Don't argue with them. You told me this would happen.

Leave her alone."

This is what 7-year-old Andrew Bridge thought as the police took him from his mentally ill mother on a Saturday afternoon on the streets of Los Angeles. Torn between the desire to protect his beloved mother and the need to be safe, he was pulled away from her and into a life that proved only marginally more bearable than his harrowing existence with her. Andy was taken to MacLaren Hall, public orphanage, "death house of childhoods," and then placed with an emotionally and often physically abusive foster familyin the San Fernando Valley, where he stayed for 11 years. And yet, "Hope's Boy," published earlier this month and reaching No. 6 on the New York Times bestseller list, is not an abuse book. The man I sit talking with 38 years later radiates happiness, excitement, health. He carries a picture of his mom on his iPhone. Bridge looks boyish, though not at all like the boy sporting an odd, blank, half-smiling stare on the book's cover. When he's particularly thrilled with a topic, he literally hops up and down, even when seated. "This is not a book about me," he insists. "It is a book about my mother."

His mother, Hope, was beautiful and proud. "When my mother walked down the street," the book begins, "men noticed." Bridge was proud of her, in spite of the precarious life she led with him -- full of dangerous men and angry landlords and bloody, botched suicides. Bridge describes his mother in the courtroom scene in which he was officially removed from her care. "My mother was twenty-four years old, descended from a line of impoverished women, educated to the tenth grade, abandoned by a husband, and plagued with fear. Standing at the judging bar, she must have recalled courtroom encounters from her own childhood. Now, a woman among her betters, she could do nothing more than be still and be judged." Helping vulnerable people, especially children and women, would become his life's work.

Not only did Bridge survive, he triumphed over the odds. Despite the fact that only 2% of the nation's 500,000-plus children in foster care get a college degree,he got a scholarship to Wesleyan University and then graduated from Harvard Law School. He got a Fulbright, studied in Germany and after a stint representing children on behalf of a national civil rights organization, took the job as executive director of the Alliance for Children's Rights in Los Angeles, suing bureaucracies and institutions that fail to respect the rights of society's most vulnerable citizens.