Michael Rosen's seven-year-old son Ripton one day decided to join a pick-up game of baseball with some older kids in the park. At the end of the game Ripton asked his new friends if they wanted to come back to his house for snacks and Nintendo. Over time, five of the boys—all black and Hispanic, from the impoverished neighborhood across the park—became a fixture in the Rosens' home and eventually started referring to Michael and his wife Leslie as their parents. The boys began to see the Rosens as more than just an arcade of middle-class creature comforts; the Rosens began to learn the full stories of the boys' fractured lives.Soon Michael and Leslie decided that their responsibility, like that of parents everywhere, was to help all their boys get a start in life. So began a turbulent learning experience all round, beautifully and movingly depicted in What Else But Home. It's a quest to escape the previously inevitable, a test of the resilience of a newly assembled family, a love story unlike any other, and a celebration of the fact that, whatever our differences, baseball and commitment can help us bridge them.

Product Description: When Andrew Bridge was seven years old, he and his mother-a mentally unstable woman who loved her child more than she could care for him-slid deeper and deeper into poverty, until they were reduced to scavenging for food in trash bins...read more

Relates the author's harrowing family circumstances that led to his placement in the equally daunting foster-care system, and describes how he beat the odds through high academic achievement.

Product Description: Sunshine, you're my baby and I'm your only mother. You must mind the one taking care of you, but she's not your mama."" Ashley Rhodes-Courter spent nine years of her life in fourteen different foster homes, living by those words. As her mother spirals out of control, Ashley is left clinging to an unpredictable, dissolving relationship, all the while getting pulled deeper and deeper into the foster care system...read more

Product Description: FOR USE IN SCHOOLS AND LIBRARIES ONLY. Traces the author's painful childhood in a series of foster homes, an upbringing marked by a deteriorating relationship with her emotionally unstable mother, manipulative and humiliating abuse at the hands of a foster family, and her subsequent efforts to advocate for an improved foster care system...read more

Product Description: Climb aboard to hear the true storiesof the children who rode the Orphan Train By Train They Came: Fragile Excess Baggage, Vol. 1 is the perfect adjunct to Plains Bound: Fragile Cargo, which brought us the extraordinary history of the Orphan Train Riders...read more

A Young and the Restless actress and ballet dancer describes her origins as a mixed-race child from the Maine foster care system, her efforts to build her career, and the remarkable women who supported and inspired her life. 100,000 first printing.

Product Description: Joe Jacoby, who worked in the early days of live TV and went on to become a pioneering filmmaker, has never before revealed that his childhood was spent in foster homes and institutions. An NYU film school classmate of Martin Scorsese, Jacoby survived a childhood wrought with abuse and neglect: his mother's unpredictable and sometimes dangerous behavior forced friends to commit her; he then grew up in seven foster homes in Brooklyn, and two institutions (one for emotionally disturbed children)...read more

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Product Description: My name is Adam. I was trained to keep silent and still. As children around me played games, –I watched. As they studied and learned, –I colored pictures. I never knew my parents. I was told I had siblings, but I doubt they knew I existed...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

An account of the sexual molestation of Thomas Waters describes how the Department of Child Services removed Waters from his own troubled home only to place him under the care of a known child molester. 15,000 first printing. $12,500 ad/promo.

Product Description: Story of Jillian

Product Description: Rose's Story: Rose, a Survivor of Our Social Service