I'm reading tonight, Wed @ 7:30 @ Tattered Cover in Denver. I've written What Else But Home... a FEEL GOOD book about a cute doggie....

and a beautiful blond haired boy who loves his cute doggie...

and the way the blond haired boy and the cute doggie and six other boys who are now young men show just how beautiful America can be...

for my Facebook friends, I've embedded Ray Charles singing "America the Beautiful" here... so go to MY BLOG... because Facebook will strip this video way. Or go to this LINK.

so my book is OF COURSE a FEEL GOOD book for the upcoming HOLIDAYS !, which you can give as a gift to yourself and your loved ones....

Now that we've established FACT, I'm going to paste an email I received from a very smart academic, whose name I will not reveal. I will say that all his ADJECTIVES are clearly, modestly wise...

"What Else But Home is the creation of a person with incredible will power and the ability to totally ignore what most people would call practicality and common sense. Hence you were able to do something that some people have talked about, but few people have done, and in the process given five young men opportunities that should by rights have been theirs, but would never have gotten any other way... You also wrote about it with an ethnographers eye, and with writing skills that you honed through years of practice.

"The book is brilliant, subtle, and revelatory on many, many levels, but it presents readers with a challenge that few will be willing to face. Your example holds people accountable in ways that will make them very, very uncomfortable. It not only exposes the injustice of social arrangements that most New Yorkers [one could say "Americans"] have come to take for granted, it also reveals their complicity in those arrangements and offers a solution, short of revolution, that only a handful would take... To the astute reader, it's the very opposite of a "Feel Good" book. You come away... [understanding] how wide we have allowed race and class barriers to become, and how they don't require extreme neighborhood segregation to sustain- they can flourish among people living across the street from one another and using the same urban spaces (albeit at different times and/or in different ways!)

As for your next book... when it comes to something meaningful and original and disturbing, it will be hard to top What Else But Home."

SO.... since we need "meaningful and original," and perhaps "disturbing" on occasion, please consider giving What Else But Home as a HOLIDAY gift to your loved ones, your friends and yourself.

AND, Professor Mark Naison, head of African-American studies at Fordham University in the Bronx, has included What Else But Home among his 5 "My Favorite Books of the Year - Which Would Make Great Christmas/Hanukah/Kwanzaa Presents!" His choices are:

What Else But Home by Michael Rosen

The remarkable story of a wealthy family on the Lower East side that adoped five black and Latino boys from the projects who their sons- also adopted- met playing baseball in Tompkins Square Park

Boulevard of Dreams by Connie Rosenblum

A beautifully written history of the Grand Concourse that deals honestly with racial discrimination during it's heyday as a showcase for middle class life in the Bronx

Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original by Robin Kelley

Definitive biography of a jazz innovator who had a strong connection to the Bronx!

It's Just Begun by DJ Discowiz and Ivan Sanchez

The remarkable life of Hip Hop's First Latino DJ and a powerful meditation on how violence in the home breeds violence in the streets

and- of course

The Rat That Got Away: A Bronx Memoir by Allen Jones with Mark Naison

The story of a basketball star and heroin dealer from the South Bronx who remade his life after a stint on Rikers Island and ended up as coach, radio personality and banker in Luxembourg.

and this is Tattered Cover...