What Else But Home: Seven Boys and an American Journey Between the Projects and the Penthouse

What else but sharing a home and all the concepts and activities of a nurturing, loving, safe place......Michael and Leslie first adopted two boys. This unselfish act of love was expanded by their informal adoption of five MORE boys. The epitome of selfless sharing! Nine people and their intertwined loving (most of the time!) lives give our world an example of the outcome of "just doing the right thing". WHAT ELSE BUT HOME is a complete sensory scrapbook telling the story of the differences of rich and poor, white and colors, fear and respect, prejudice and acceptence and the real truth. After all the differences are equalized, humans are really mostly all good and equal souls. Michael Rosen's writing, to me, gave a beautiful and accurate tale of the travels of this amazing family. Yes, the book is long, as some have complained. In my eye, this had to be a BIG book to portray, so beautifully and personally, all the small moments, creating the history of the family. As I read I felt like I was hearing Michael Rosen talking to me, or hearing the discussions of the boys trying to figure out their respective likenesses and differences. I could even smell the smells and visualize the invasion at the Chinese resturant! This book moved me in a way few have. What started as two parents' hopes to give their sons a place in the real world became the real world as it should be! When given a chance, a quality education and present parents...every child has a chance! P.S.And one of my greatest moments was meeting Michael Rosen at the Wisconsin Book Fair on 10/11/09. What fun!

What Else But Home: An Inspiring, Disturbing Book that Pulls The Covers Off Race and Class Barriers in Gentrifying New York What Else But Home: Seven Boys and an American Journey From the Projects to the Penthouse by Michael Rosen, is a tough minded, unsparingly honest, brilliantly written book about one family's efforts to bridge race and class barriers that have grown to unprecedented proportions in Michael Bloomberg's New York, especially in gentrifying neighborhoods like the Lower East Side. The story line is deceptively simple. The author and his wife, wealthy professionals living in a penthouse apartment overlooking Tompkins Square Park, decide to take in, and informally adopt five black and latino boys, all of whom live in neighborhood housing projects, who their son Ripton meets in pick up baseball games in the Park. Given the results, that all five boys end up staying of jail , getting GED's and high school diplomas, and attending college or community college, you might think this is a feel good story. But what the Rosens, their two children ( both adopted) and the five boys have to do to get there is so painful, so difficult, and so beyond the range of what most people would be willing to do that it makes the barriers they crossed seem almost unbridgeable. Although the challenge this family took on inspired love and trust and generosity, it also produced levels of conflict and misunderstanding that almost broke every person who participated. Michael Rosen, a man of uncommon honesty and literary skill, puts all of this before us without pretence or embarrassment, forcing every reader to ask- could I do what this family has done, could I live with this level of tension, could I come up with the heroism needed to deal with crisis after crisis without saying enough is enough, especially in the light of some extraordinary words of wisdom a friend shared with them when boys started staying at their house "If you're going to let them be here, it has to be unconditional. They'll test it because disadvantaged kids are always screwed over. Teachers start nice, social workers, their mom's new boyfriends all start nice, get tired and walk away. These kids don't know it, but they are fighting for their lives. It is a matter of life and death. . . . If you let them into your family, it has to be forever." What does forever mean when you have seven boys, two middle class, but adopted and five who have grown up in incredible poverty, violence and chaos, living with a married couple with ample resources and wonderful intentions but all kinds of baggage and a marriage that is falling apart ( the Rosens actually separate for a time when they are taking care of the five boys) First of all, it means constant misunderstanding. One of the best features of this book is the author's ability to capture the two different languages spoken in his home- the urban, working class youth dialect the boys speak and the middle class con

I've read about the author, Michael Rosen, and his family a while ago in NY Times -- an article about a white couple with two sons took in five Black, Latino boys (the bigger boys) from nearby projects to their penthouse. It could be one of those ordinary philanthropic stories of what a rich man has done with his money. But this one, told by author himself, is different. If you expect a story of Daddy Long-legs or Cinderella you will be disappointed. First of all, Rosen is not a saint -- he gets angry, makes mistakes, struggles, and gets emotional.But he cares deeply about the bigger boys, who are on the verge of falling into the vicious cycle of poverty, apathy, violence and crime. Some are abused, some are fatherless, some are heavily-impoverished and their emotional traumas are significant. Although their lives are described matter-of-factly in this book, they feel so raw that hurt. Rosen and his wife try to get the bigger boys through school system to college, which makes all the difference in young men's lives, and of course it is not the easiest task. They yell, argue, nag, curse a lot at each other along the way (vividly written with lots of ghetto words). This book is really gripping, partly because of its brilliant conversational form, but mainly because the characters are living "now" -- since the first time Rosen's own son brought his "friends" from neighbourhood park, nothing is planned, nothing is taken for granted, nothing is predictable -- they struggle together, get over obstacles one by one toward an unlikely goal (colleges) which readers hope to see at the end of this book. As a single parent of a young boy, I've read many parenting books seeking an answer to my all-time question: "How can I be a good parent?". Unexpectedly, this memoir gives me some clue about parenthood --- when some of the boys start to quote Rosen as "My father", it shows what it takes for a man to be a father. A man becomes a father not when he inseminates a woman, but when he goes to his kids' baseball games, moans over report cards, goes to bookstore to get them books, just "be there" when kids need him, and never let kids go when they are about to wander away. This honest story of sometimes-messy seven years of an accidental family made me smile, think, and cry all at the same time.

This exceptionally strong memoir is set in the Lower East Side of Manhattan in a racially and economically mixed neighborhood in which Michael Rosen¹s seven-year-old son Ripton walked his parents and younger brother onto a black top baseball field in an urban park across the street from their penthouse apartment home. The game unleashed a chain of happenstance growing an extended family. And this family shows the potential of compassion and commitment to soften (and I hope overcome) the face of poverty in our country. Rosen¹s is a beautifully written and unflinchingly honest story of race and class, of fatherless, parenting and baseball. To have lived the story would be extraordinary, to write about it with grace, nuance and moments of the sublime is a gift to America¹s best promise. To us Rosen offers grim, matter-of-fact realities of the lives of the five ³bigger boys² who became family in the years after that first baseball game. Each boy came from public or other subsidized housing. They are Black, Dominican, Puerto Rican, Catholic and Protestant, and the Rosen¹s white Jews. Ripton and his younger brother Morgan were adopted. Michael and his wife, Leslie Gruss, a physician, lead honest lives with regular ups and downs. Commitment wavers, but is not broken. And throughout, lives are changed in ways expected and shocking. I have favorite moments. I laughed and cried, I was angry at everyone at times and proud of them. From the beginning, this book is a page-turner. It is the best book I remember about the differences separating the college educated and those without this opportunity. It shows the emptiness left from not having fathers, the dangers that fills that space, yet what can be done. I didn't want the book to end.

This family memoir traces the challenges and joys experienced when a white prosperous New York City family with two young adopted sons of their own find themselves parenting a group of five disadvantaged black and Hispanic kids who befriend their seven-year old son during a summer game of sandlot baseball in Tompkins Square Park in 1998. What starts as a casual relationship -- the kids come over to the apartment after the game for snacks and Nintendo -- turns gradually into a full-blown parental relationship. Michael Rosen, the father, explores the challenges of relating and caring for boys from the most disadvantaged backgrounds -- kids whose own fathers have left (or in one case, was murdered), mothers who are chronically unemployed, brothers who run drug rings in their projects. The five disadvantaged kids eventually integrate -- with fits and starts -- into the Rosen family. Michael and his wife Leslie Gruss make sure that their wards get through high school, and into college -- though the process is anything but straightforward. And the nuclear family changes as well -- the decision to help raise these kids influences the relationship between Michael and Leslie, and between them and their adopted children. Rosen is an enchanting writer, with a keen eye, ferocious honesty, and a wonderfully idiosyncratic style. In the process, he forces the reader to think deeply about family, parenting, class divisions, and the commitment required to achieve results in the face of extraordinary obstacles. A fine memoir, one with something for everyone who has ever been a parent, or for that matter a child.