FOUR FEET TALL AND RISING

A salty, pugnacious memoir of a Little Person, his gangland background, his love of pit bulls and his road back from self-destruction.

Rossi is known to many as a brash-talking TV personality whose mission is to rehabilitate the pit bulls’ woeful image. “The dogs were not designed to kill,” he writes. “They had no special “enzyme” that made them fight. It’s only humans that consciously make the decision to kill. All dogs are capable of violence if they’ve been trained by shitty owners to be nasty, protective, fighting machines.” Rossi has seen the same thing happen with another species—his own. He barely survived his youth at the hands of a violently abusive father, fleeing to his friend’s house in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles, where by dint of association he became a member of the Bloods gang. He lived on the edge, always ready for something bad to happen: “I learned to protect myself. I carried guns.” This path would earn him 11 years in prison, where he was the only white man housed in a black unit, preferring Blood relations to life with the Aryan Brotherhood. His prison diary is told with a surprising degree of insight, but this is a story of redemption. Eventually Rossi managed to wire his act together, starting a Little People talent agency, working hard as an actor and dance man and working tirelessly to resuscitate the pit bull and bull terrier image. “That’s the most important thing,” he writes. “To give something back, no matter what it is…To actually be considered a success, you gotta give a shit.” Now he has caught a little break, a moment of fame, and he’s using it for the dogs and the Little People.

A candid, charged slice of personal history.