Author Michael Rosen reads from New Book & Leads Discussion

What Else But Home: Seven Boys and an American Journey From the Projects to the Penthouse
Author Michael Rosen will read from his new book and lead a discussion about transcending racial and class bias. His book has been described as 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.

Michael Rosen is a community organizer, former real estate developer, former financial and public sector CEO, and a former professor at NYU. He lives in the Lower East Side with his wife Leslie Gruss and their extended family.

Michael has written What Else But Home: Seven Boys and an American Journey Between the Projects and the Penthouse, about his family's improvised journey across the divide of race, class, and economic opportunity in the Lower East Side of New York. It's an unflinching and compelling first-hand account of how his familyhimself, an investor and real estate developer, and his doctor wife and their two kids, living in a luxury penthouse on Tompkins Square Park evolved to include five black and Latino boys from the neighborhood.

Adults agonize about crossing boundaries of ethnicity and class. Seven-year-olds do not, especially when there's a baseball game to join. When Ripton Rosen, Michael and his wife Leslie's adopted son, joined a pick-up game in 1998 with kids from the nearby projects, and then invited the kids home to play Nintendo and have snacks, he wasn't interested in a compelling social experiment or family drama. He was just doing what kids do playing with other kids. But as a group of the boys from the projects grew close to the Rosen family, an extraordinary chronicle of improvisation and experimentation began for all concerned. Eventually five of them began to refer to Michael and Leslie Rosen as Mom and Dad, and the couple took on much of the emotional and many of the practical responsibilities of parenting teenage boys through school, into work and, hilariously, out of their local world and into the history and culture of America from colonial Williamsburg to Miami.

Michael Rosen has written the story of his "random family." He's a central participant but also a wonderful listener to the conversations of his newly compiled family. He's honest, unsparing, and passionate a flawed but utterly engaged parent. He and Leslie do not theorize about the rights and wrongs of what they have by accident taken on; they, like any devoted parents, keep moving forward. They encounter all the bumps and switchbacks on the road of inner-city adolescence, with kids whose needs are at first unguessable and whose histories all contain a measure of tragedy.

Commentary:

"Many people talk about what they can do to reach across divides, to create a better world. The Rosens didn't just talk, they plunged, headlong, into an extraordinary adventure of shared purpose and unflinching commitment. Michael Rosen takes readers on a death-defying journeygritty, surprising, funny and fiercely honest. What was defied? The death of hope. What we're now graced with? An inspiring book about what one family can accomplish."
Ron Suskind, Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist and author of A Hope in the Unseen

"For Michael Rosen to have lived this story would've been sufficient. For him to be able to write about it with such beauty and grit, such delicacy and bluntness, seems like a gift of destiny. "What Else But Home" renders our countrys defining forces of race and class and immigration down to the societys molecular unit, the family, and shows us what we have become and might become, in all our heroic messiness. This is a valentine to Americas diversity and indeed to every enterprise of courage, chaos, and love that results in magic."
Diane McWhorter, Pulitzer Prizewinning author of Carry Me Home