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2024 U. Chi. L. Rev. Online 1 (2024)

handle is hein.journals/uchidial2024 and id is 1 raw text is: 01/05/24 U. Chi. L. Rev. Online *1 BOOK REVIEW Chaotic Childhoods Stephanos Bibas* Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class Rob Henderson, Gallery Books, 2024, 336 pages. Introduction Life at the bottom is troubled. Charles Dickens, Victor Hugo, and many others have long shown us that. To understand criminal justice, education, and family law, we lawyers typically look to social scientists, and their external expertise does teach us much. But we often neglect lived experience. Occasionally, we should toggle from the dry regressions and clinical detachment of social science to the internal perspective and expertise of those who live through family breakup, foster care, disrupted schooling, drugs, and crime. And that is what Rob Henderson's breakout memoir, Troubled, gives us: a window on troubled youth.' Henderson, a brilliant young psychologist, illumines how harmful childhood instability is by reflecting on his own experience. He never knew his father, was abandoned by his drug-addicted mother, and bounced around foster care. After squandering much of his early education and drowning his rage in alcohol, drugs, fights, and vandalism, he managed to make his way through the Air Force to Yale and now Cambridge. But few of his friends escaped the wounds from their childhoods; many wound up unemployed, in prison, or dead. His eye is as keen as his intellect, recalling and reporting how adults in his life kept abandoning him and his fellow foster children and how they in turn acted out. As an outsider to the elites who dominate the Ivies, he also turns his critical eye on the groupthink and victimhood culture that is strongest among the most privileged. And building on literary historian Paul Fussell's work, Henderson develops his own critique of * Stephanos Bibas is a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit and a senior fellow at the University of Pennsylvania Law School. He thanks Brynne Follman and Joseph Graziano for their help. 1 ROB HENDERSON, TROUBLED: A MEMOIR OF FOSTER CARE, FAMILY, AND SOCIAL CLASS (forthcoming 2024) (on file with publisher). All further citations to this work are by page number in parentheticals in the text.

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