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Freedomland
In Freedomland, Richard Price returns to the gritty terrain he first explored in Clockers. This time, the fictional (but all too convincing) urban eyesore of Dempsy, New Jersey, is convulsed by a high-profile carjacking. A single mom named Brenda Martin insists that a man stopped her car, yanked her from behind the wheel, and drove off with the vehicle--and her young son. Behind these horrific facts looms another: the victim is white and the perpetrator is black. Immediately the racial calculus of American life comes to bear on the crime, which becomes a focus for long-smoldering animosities. As a three-ring circus of media, cops, and gawkers converges on the crime scene, Dempsy and the adjoining white community of Gannon seem primed for an explosion. Price passes the narrative baton back and forth between Lorenzo Council, an ambitious black detective, and Jesse Haus, a no-less-ambitious reporter for the local paper. Lorenzo's street-smart, agitated voice is the more convincing of the two. Jesse, with her frantic compulsion to squeeze local color from the crisis, never quite attains three dimensions--although her outsider's relationship to her material suggests some faint, fascinating echo of the author's. In any case, Price allows the story to proceed at an irresistible slow burn. His ear for dialogue is as sharp as ever, and nobody casts a colder or more accurate eye on our fin-de-siècle urban existence.
560 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1998
98 people are currently reading
2467 people want to read
About the author
Richard Price
133 books956 followersLibrarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name.
Also writes under the pen name Harry Brandt
A self-described "middle class Jewish kid," Price grew up in a housing project in the northeast Bronx. Today, he lives in New York City with his family.
Price graduated from the Bronx High School of Science in 1967 and obtained a BA from Cornell University and an MFA from Columbia. He also did graduate work at Stanford. He has taught writing at Columbia, Yale, and New York University. He was one of the first people interviewed on the NPR show Fresh Air when it began airing nationally in 1987. In 1999, he received the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature.
Price's novels explore late 20th century urban America in a gritty, realistic manner that has brought him considerable literary acclaim. Several of his novels are set in a fictional northern New Jersey city called Dempsy. In his review of Lush Life (2008), Walter Kirn compared Price to Raymond Chandler and Saul Bellow.
Price's first novel was The Wanderers (1974), a coming-of-age story set in the Bronx in 1962, written when Price was 24 years old. It was adapted into a movie in 1979, with a screenplay by Rose and Philip Kaufman and directed by the latter.
Clockers (1992) was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award. It has been praised for its humor, suspense, dialogue, and characterizations. In 1995, it was made into a movie directed by Spike Lee; Price and Lee shared writing credits for the screenplay.
Price has written numerous screenplays, of which the best known are The Color of Money (1986), for which he was nominated for an Oscar, Life Lessons (the Martin Scorsese segment of New York Stories) (1989), Sea of Love (1989), Mad Dog and Glory (1992), Ransom (1996), and Shaft (2000). He also wrote for the HBO series The Wire. Price was nominated for the Writers Guild of America Award award for Best Dramatic Series at the February 2009 ceremony for his work on the fifth season of The Wire. He is often cast in cameo roles in the films he writes.
Price also wrote and conceptualized the 15 minute film surrounding Michael Jackson's "Bad" video.
Additionally, he has published articles in the The New York Times, Esquire Magazine, The New Yorker, Village Voice, Rolling Stone, and others.
Also writes under the pen name Harry Brandt
A self-described "middle class Jewish kid," Price grew up in a housing project in the northeast Bronx. Today, he lives in New York City with his family.
Price graduated from the Bronx High School of Science in 1967 and obtained a BA from Cornell University and an MFA from Columbia. He also did graduate work at Stanford. He has taught writing at Columbia, Yale, and New York University. He was one of the first people interviewed on the NPR show Fresh Air when it began airing nationally in 1987. In 1999, he received the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature.
Price's novels explore late 20th century urban America in a gritty, realistic manner that has brought him considerable literary acclaim. Several of his novels are set in a fictional northern New Jersey city called Dempsy. In his review of Lush Life (2008), Walter Kirn compared Price to Raymond Chandler and Saul Bellow.
Price's first novel was The Wanderers (1974), a coming-of-age story set in the Bronx in 1962, written when Price was 24 years old. It was adapted into a movie in 1979, with a screenplay by Rose and Philip Kaufman and directed by the latter.
Clockers (1992) was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award. It has been praised for its humor, suspense, dialogue, and characterizations. In 1995, it was made into a movie directed by Spike Lee; Price and Lee shared writing credits for the screenplay.
Price has written numerous screenplays, of which the best known are The Color of Money (1986), for which he was nominated for an Oscar, Life Lessons (the Martin Scorsese segment of New York Stories) (1989), Sea of Love (1989), Mad Dog and Glory (1992), Ransom (1996), and Shaft (2000). He also wrote for the HBO series The Wire. Price was nominated for the Writers Guild of America Award award for Best Dramatic Series at the February 2009 ceremony for his work on the fifth season of The Wire. He is often cast in cameo roles in the films he writes.
Price also wrote and conceptualized the 15 minute film surrounding Michael Jackson's "Bad" video.
Additionally, he has published articles in the The New York Times, Esquire Magazine, The New Yorker, Village Voice, Rolling Stone, and others.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 187 reviews
July 1, 2014
I reviewed Clockers and Lush Life but not this mighty novel. What's that all about, hmm? Exhaustion, I think, because all these novels are quite similar and told in the same manically detailed no-stone-unturned way and they all do the same thing, which is to take a tale from the urban underbelly which could be easily summarised in two sentences and expand it into a 700 page brainmelt.
I love them all, but I read Freedomland first (5 stars), then Lush Life (4 stars), then Clockers (3 stars). So hmm, I think Richard Price is wearing off. He needs to make a come-back. I think he should find a story from the seamy side of the American experience which you could easily summarise in ONE sentence and blow it up into a THOUSAND page novel.
Actually, I think if you haven't read this guy, you could prolly read them in the reverse order to me, and your rating would also go 5, 4, then 3.
But these three novels add up to 1,700 pages. That's like Lord of the Rings or sumpin. And all of these 1,700 pages are between a high three and a clear 5. There is not one page that drops to a two. So, you know, I urge you. Consider yourself urged.
There is a guy who works for the same company I do whose name is Richard Price. I asked him, are you THE Richard Price. But he just said he was A Richard Price.
I love them all, but I read Freedomland first (5 stars), then Lush Life (4 stars), then Clockers (3 stars). So hmm, I think Richard Price is wearing off. He needs to make a come-back. I think he should find a story from the seamy side of the American experience which you could easily summarise in ONE sentence and blow it up into a THOUSAND page novel.
Actually, I think if you haven't read this guy, you could prolly read them in the reverse order to me, and your rating would also go 5, 4, then 3.
But these three novels add up to 1,700 pages. That's like Lord of the Rings or sumpin. And all of these 1,700 pages are between a high three and a clear 5. There is not one page that drops to a two. So, you know, I urge you. Consider yourself urged.
There is a guy who works for the same company I do whose name is Richard Price. I asked him, are you THE Richard Price. But he just said he was A Richard Price.
December 30, 2007
this is an amazing book. After reading it I put it down and then read four more by Price--there's quite an evolution in his plotting. But throughout his books, the dialogue is as good as any I've read. His novels are as novels should be: deceptively easy to read--simple at first glance, but filled with complex prose and just enough wisdom that the reader doesn't notice until the last page is turned.
January 26, 2024
My third by this author and once again I am in awe of this man’s knowledge of urban life on the street, police work, city politics and the news media. Or so it would seem, since I have no firsthand knowledge whatsoever, learning entirely from reading books like this and watching movies and cable miniseries. If I’m not mistaken, this author, a seemingly quiet, small man (or so I deem from the jacket), has written a great deal for The Wire (HBO) and Homicide (network television). I really enjoyed Clockers and Lush Life and Freedomland sets its plot this time in a fictional housing project in the sweltering heat of the city of Newark, NJ. I read this during an extreme cold spell here in January, so I had to use my imagination.
The plot is the appearance of a fragile, white woman wandering one night through a dangerous part of the projects, blood on her hands, proclaiming a carjacking by a black man in a running suit. One of the two main characters, the detective Lorenzo Council, a very large black detective who keeps the peace in the housing projects, from which he was raised and emerged after a brush or two with the law himself. He skillfully extracts the statement from Brenda, our fragile white lady, that her son was in the car. This sets the plot in motion and all hell breaks loose as the projects are turned upside down. The other main character is Jessie, a reporter, who gets access to the victim by calling in favors with Lorenzo.
This story covers 2-3 days and we get a first-row seat in the heads of Lorenzo and Jessie, as they use all their experience and psychological tricks to uncover the truth by understanding the victim. The title of this book is an abandoned area where a theme park once was, in better times, and where the crime is ultimately solved. We get a deep view into the lives, upbringing and influences of many, many other characters. This book was large (652 pages), yet the prose and dialogue are so crisp and true that you can’t help but enjoy the long ride (I’ve watched all 3.5 hours alertly of Apocalypse Now Redux). Price educates me with the history of people like this in the late 90s, areas I have otherwise seen only from a car en route to affluent places of business (research in pharma) outside of Newark. His character depth is astonishing, and we can’t help but root for the asthmatic, lovable tough guy Lorenzo and the scrappy, workaholic Jessie. Her brother Ben, a large hulking bodyguard, is one of the more interesting characters.
What makes this an excellent read is the nuanced way it explains how prejudice in all people lead to pain and suffering. Moral ambiguity abounds, as the characters wrestle with doing the right thing vs. getting results at any costs in a competitive world. Price reminds us of what is is like to be uniquely human, he inhabits a diverse group of souls, somehow, magically he does this. They feel real, so authentic, and the prose is not cliqued or billowy – it is tight and muscular. Tough people enduring difficult times, some with grace and many without. The tension is this story is anguish of finding the truth, when so much falsehood and mystery inhabits the human soul – Price does this better than anyone, I recall the long interview sessions with Andre Braugher in the series Homicide - likely written by our author, a master of this dialogue and mental conflict.
This review is flat and uninspired, my muses are comatose, I’m not doing this excellent book justice so drawing this to a close.
The plot is the appearance of a fragile, white woman wandering one night through a dangerous part of the projects, blood on her hands, proclaiming a carjacking by a black man in a running suit. One of the two main characters, the detective Lorenzo Council, a very large black detective who keeps the peace in the housing projects, from which he was raised and emerged after a brush or two with the law himself. He skillfully extracts the statement from Brenda, our fragile white lady, that her son was in the car. This sets the plot in motion and all hell breaks loose as the projects are turned upside down. The other main character is Jessie, a reporter, who gets access to the victim by calling in favors with Lorenzo.
This story covers 2-3 days and we get a first-row seat in the heads of Lorenzo and Jessie, as they use all their experience and psychological tricks to uncover the truth by understanding the victim. The title of this book is an abandoned area where a theme park once was, in better times, and where the crime is ultimately solved. We get a deep view into the lives, upbringing and influences of many, many other characters. This book was large (652 pages), yet the prose and dialogue are so crisp and true that you can’t help but enjoy the long ride (I’ve watched all 3.5 hours alertly of Apocalypse Now Redux). Price educates me with the history of people like this in the late 90s, areas I have otherwise seen only from a car en route to affluent places of business (research in pharma) outside of Newark. His character depth is astonishing, and we can’t help but root for the asthmatic, lovable tough guy Lorenzo and the scrappy, workaholic Jessie. Her brother Ben, a large hulking bodyguard, is one of the more interesting characters.
What makes this an excellent read is the nuanced way it explains how prejudice in all people lead to pain and suffering. Moral ambiguity abounds, as the characters wrestle with doing the right thing vs. getting results at any costs in a competitive world. Price reminds us of what is is like to be uniquely human, he inhabits a diverse group of souls, somehow, magically he does this. They feel real, so authentic, and the prose is not cliqued or billowy – it is tight and muscular. Tough people enduring difficult times, some with grace and many without. The tension is this story is anguish of finding the truth, when so much falsehood and mystery inhabits the human soul – Price does this better than anyone, I recall the long interview sessions with Andre Braugher in the series Homicide - likely written by our author, a master of this dialogue and mental conflict.
This review is flat and uninspired, my muses are comatose, I’m not doing this excellent book justice so drawing this to a close.
April 30, 2008
Price is an author in the vein of David Simon. He's a white man who, for whatever reason, can really write about the black experience. I don't know if that's a fair or accurate assessment - or one that he would even want to claim - but it's the feeling I get when reading his novels.
Price uses some of the same tricks as Simon, the most prominent being his unwillingness to dumb down or explain street slang, his jumping straight into a story without bothering to lay out an easily understood back story. The reader is left to figure it all out, untangling the suspense like a silent character in the book itself.
This particular book was about a white woman whose son has gone missing. She claims she was carjacked by a black man. A city wide search instantly ensues and naturally, racial tensions are stretched to the snapping point.
While this book was good, there were times when I was vastly annoyed by the drawn out wordiness of it. The book spans approximately 2 1/2 days and yet it's over 500 pages long. Many elements of the plot are too drawn out, although in Price's defense, even the most inane seeming subplot is usually brought to some satisfying (or pointed) conclusion.
Price uses some of the same tricks as Simon, the most prominent being his unwillingness to dumb down or explain street slang, his jumping straight into a story without bothering to lay out an easily understood back story. The reader is left to figure it all out, untangling the suspense like a silent character in the book itself.
This particular book was about a white woman whose son has gone missing. She claims she was carjacked by a black man. A city wide search instantly ensues and naturally, racial tensions are stretched to the snapping point.
While this book was good, there were times when I was vastly annoyed by the drawn out wordiness of it. The book spans approximately 2 1/2 days and yet it's over 500 pages long. Many elements of the plot are too drawn out, although in Price's defense, even the most inane seeming subplot is usually brought to some satisfying (or pointed) conclusion.
January 21, 2025
"Parents, no matter how angry, how strict or repressive, as long as they provided three squares, a cot, and consistent rules to live by, were to be respected, were to be honored, were to be treasured because, without a family in place, without at least some facsimile of a family in place, no kid stood a chance, at least not in Lorenzo’s neck of the woods."
This one was long and it was intense and in my opinion better than Lush Life. The grim setting and racial tensions alone are enough to make for a tense atmosphere, add the apparent kidnapping of a white child by a black man and you can imagine what comes next. Richard Price is a master of dialogue and his characters are so alive you feel like you know them, by the end of the book I was finding it hard to breathe from Detective Lorenzo Council's asthma attacks!
This one was long and it was intense and in my opinion better than Lush Life. The grim setting and racial tensions alone are enough to make for a tense atmosphere, add the apparent kidnapping of a white child by a black man and you can imagine what comes next. Richard Price is a master of dialogue and his characters are so alive you feel like you know them, by the end of the book I was finding it hard to breathe from Detective Lorenzo Council's asthma attacks!
February 23, 2022
A masterpiece.
February 11, 2025
Freedomland is an epic novel. The fact that the action takes place over the course of just 72 hours, and the geographic reach encompasses only a few square miles in New Jersey does not alter that description. This is a big story that asks big questions in great depth. It's about law and order, truth and lies, the role and boundaries of the media and law enforcement, race relations, friendship, family, trust and loyalty.
At it's core is the death of a small child, which may have occurred by accident, through negligence or through foul play.
But this is not a quick who- or whydoneit. Action yields to slow-paced interactions between many characters, as a detective strives to save a missing child, or solve a terrible crime before a city and its various conflicting factions face off, and wage war or self-destruct. The main characters are richly drawn, the dialogue is sensational, and the choices people are faced with are real and heart wrenching.
This is the fourth excellent book I have read by Richard Price, and the best so far.
At it's core is the death of a small child, which may have occurred by accident, through negligence or through foul play.
But this is not a quick who- or whydoneit. Action yields to slow-paced interactions between many characters, as a detective strives to save a missing child, or solve a terrible crime before a city and its various conflicting factions face off, and wage war or self-destruct. The main characters are richly drawn, the dialogue is sensational, and the choices people are faced with are real and heart wrenching.
This is the fourth excellent book I have read by Richard Price, and the best so far.
March 24, 2010
After reading Freedomland, Richard Price quickly became my guilty pleasure. I have since listened to the audio version of "Lush Life" (great audio, fantastic text), and read "Clockers." There are one or two more sitting on my bookshelf. Yes it's a cops novel, but the questions is not whodunnit, it's something deeper and better. Here, there are real racial tension issues and questions of the role of a reporter, a cop, and a mother, in figuring out what happened to a kid. No one's motivations are left unquestioned, and through his incredible dialogue and commitment to shades of gray in the morality of his characters, Price brings dignity to the grittiness of cops novels, and the pleasure far outweighs any guilt.
October 5, 2017
That was a loooooong book. Over 700 pages. I’m surprised I finished it as I somewhat remembered the movie. I knew how it ended. But I didn’t recall the actual ending. I had forgotten certain key points. I knew there was a race thing going on but I didn’t remember the walk and the clash that happened near the end. I expected a clash and envisioned a much more violent one.
January 30, 2020
3.5*
Alright but, tooooo looooong!
Alright but, tooooo looooong!
June 13, 2023
A very long book, set in two adjacent housing projcts in two cities in New Jersey. A reported car jacking by a black man with a white 4 year old boy in the car rapidly escalates. As well as a police story, this is also a vehicle for a realistic social commentary on community housing and race relations in 1998 when the book ws published
August 12, 2016
This book could have been a three or even four star book if it didn't have a major fatal flaw. The story is overly ambitious and not primarily feasible. The author made a good attempt to write an "epic small town" story, he remembered that it's important to have likable characters, true to form dialogue and a writing style that moves with ease inspite of the 700+ page total. But this book is full of side stories, some of which sound pretty interesting to be honest, but they don't have anything to do with the main plot theme and in most cases are not resolved in any redeeming way. I don't think the author is a fool, I think he was trying to cater to what he believes is the true experience of the police detective. Ask a person what they might have seen relative to a major crime, they might not have seen anything, but they'll let you figure that out for yourself while they fill your head with their personal troubles which you didn't come to investigate today. Two points for good narrative, but why did he have to invent a fictional Northern New Jersey county and two towns within that county? Wish he had picked actual communities, and also turned on the TV (in his Manhattan apartment) long enough to understand that New York City based Television newscasts do not send their van based reporters to report on NJ street crime. When Newark burns, they fly their helicopters over head, Why? It's easier, you don't have to fight the traffic or pay the tolls returning to Manhattan. After all, the action reporter and her girlfriends have five star dinner reservations at 8, and a private booth at Webster Hall later. They don't want to be late.. Same thing happens in Philadelphia. It's also important to recognize that more than 60% of their viewing demographics are New York State residents and they don't give two $&i!'s about who was murdered or robbed in Hoboken, East Orange or Jersey City. Those stories are left for the NJ edition print newspapers and the local access cable channels. Anyway, enough about that. Good story over all, but two or three times flawed and receives a lesser rating as a result.
January 11, 2009
The plot plays out exactly like you think it's going to and the book feels a little drawn out, but I think it's supposed to. You don't read Richard Price for the dazzling suspense or plot twists; his talent is for making the grind of urban crime feel real. And in that sense the book's structure helps you to empathize with the key figures, especially Council, the detective on the case. He too suspects early on how this story is going to end, and as it progresses and he becomes more certain, he also becomes more desperate for it to just hurry up and get there. But it doesn't. It unravels at its own, agonizing pace, like watching an uncoming train approaching that, though it's approaching from a great distance, clearly doesn't have enough space to brake before it collides with a stalled car on the tracks.
That works well for Price's gift for portraying three dimensional, realistic-feeling individuals who are nonetheless cogs in some greater sociological whole. Everyone involved in the plot knows that the outcome of the case is almost fated; the only question is how much collateral damage there's going to be in its resolution. And, although people can pour themselves into trying to effect that outcome, it's immune to individual human forces.
Call it 3.7/3.8 stars
That works well for Price's gift for portraying three dimensional, realistic-feeling individuals who are nonetheless cogs in some greater sociological whole. Everyone involved in the plot knows that the outcome of the case is almost fated; the only question is how much collateral damage there's going to be in its resolution. And, although people can pour themselves into trying to effect that outcome, it's immune to individual human forces.
Call it 3.7/3.8 stars
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
September 12, 2007
I don't know what I expected from this -- certainly not the brilliant exposure & exploration of racism in America I got. Price's dialogue is dead-on, and his stories are just heartbreaking. Un-put-downable.
October 16, 2022
"They had never really met, Jesse and Bump, but she assumed that he knew of her in much the way that she knew of him; both their names were part of the urban back-buzz, minor lights in the crime-and-punishment Milky Way."
"The Dempsey County jail stood half demolished, and the only surviving section of exterior wall, the southwest corner, was a a grotesquely defiant crumble of plaster and brick, a raised fist thrust into the flawless blue of a hot summer morning. The prison bars, running the entire length of the building but hidden from view for ninety years by a sooty gray facade, had now, in these final days, revealed the building for what it truly had been: a seven-story cage. Those bars were naked to the sun, intersecting in a grid pattern, with seven layers of sheared prison cells hanging open and raw. A century's worth of graffiti, startlingly legible to anyone walking by, marked the plaster backwalls, a titanic bulletin board shot up from hell."
"'See, we can always make amends, as long as we're honest, as long as we look in the mirror and say truly what we see. I failed him, I hurt him, I wasn't there for him. I didn't mean to, but I came up short. I admit it--I came up short. Right then and there you get your second wind, like God's breath right in your face, and as long as there's blood pumping in your veins there's a way to make it right, there's a way to make it more than right, because you did the hardest thing in the world, you looked in that mirror and you gave what you saw its rightful name. Hardest thing in the world. Took me years and years to do it, but I got more love in me now than I ever thought possible.'"
"The body lay before them like an offering, a tableau--a death for your contemplation, death itself for your contemplation, death displayed, death arrayed, death in all its inert majesty, in all its terrible absoluteness, death in your face, in your eye, a death to take your breath away..."
"The Dempsey County jail stood half demolished, and the only surviving section of exterior wall, the southwest corner, was a a grotesquely defiant crumble of plaster and brick, a raised fist thrust into the flawless blue of a hot summer morning. The prison bars, running the entire length of the building but hidden from view for ninety years by a sooty gray facade, had now, in these final days, revealed the building for what it truly had been: a seven-story cage. Those bars were naked to the sun, intersecting in a grid pattern, with seven layers of sheared prison cells hanging open and raw. A century's worth of graffiti, startlingly legible to anyone walking by, marked the plaster backwalls, a titanic bulletin board shot up from hell."
"'See, we can always make amends, as long as we're honest, as long as we look in the mirror and say truly what we see. I failed him, I hurt him, I wasn't there for him. I didn't mean to, but I came up short. I admit it--I came up short. Right then and there you get your second wind, like God's breath right in your face, and as long as there's blood pumping in your veins there's a way to make it right, there's a way to make it more than right, because you did the hardest thing in the world, you looked in that mirror and you gave what you saw its rightful name. Hardest thing in the world. Took me years and years to do it, but I got more love in me now than I ever thought possible.'"
"The body lay before them like an offering, a tableau--a death for your contemplation, death itself for your contemplation, death displayed, death arrayed, death in all its inert majesty, in all its terrible absoluteness, death in your face, in your eye, a death to take your breath away..."
August 6, 2020
I don't usually read books this lengthy. But having read both "Lush Life" and "Samaritan" I decided what the hell it's worth the time. And of course I wasn't disappointed. Price's characters and their dialogue ring true and you believe these people really exist. Having lived in NY for a couple years I'm sure they do exist. They draw you in and make you sympathetic to whatever they're going through. Lorenzo, Brenda, Jesse and many others throughout the book interact in such a natural way. Whether it be the turmoil they're experiencing or the response and reaction to what's unfolding in the story, he keeps it captivating.
Even after having the mystery solved with another hundred plus pages to go, Price continued to hold my interest. He's a storyteller, and his knack for description pulls you into his work. Mass protests, old forgotten fairgrounds, massive tenements, quirky building residents, interplay between officers and "suspects", it's all there with much more, adding to an already great story. Some people commented they'd heard the story before. Maybe it has been told, but not with the time and care Price takes in fleshing out his characters. With Brenda's shattered emotional state, or Lorenzo's seasoned detectives' skepticism towards her story, as well as their back stories and those of many others throughout the book, he brings these characters to life.
Long, maybe, but definitely worth it.
Even after having the mystery solved with another hundred plus pages to go, Price continued to hold my interest. He's a storyteller, and his knack for description pulls you into his work. Mass protests, old forgotten fairgrounds, massive tenements, quirky building residents, interplay between officers and "suspects", it's all there with much more, adding to an already great story. Some people commented they'd heard the story before. Maybe it has been told, but not with the time and care Price takes in fleshing out his characters. With Brenda's shattered emotional state, or Lorenzo's seasoned detectives' skepticism towards her story, as well as their back stories and those of many others throughout the book, he brings these characters to life.
Long, maybe, but definitely worth it.
October 3, 2019
I have had this for a while and picked it up running after being disappointed by the latest great SFF hype. I needed someone who knew how to write.
So I'm prejudiced towards his works because of the writing.
It's dated in terms of technology and in social aspects and was jarring at times.
(And, in retreat from the latest great SFF hype, I ordered everything else he has written just in case I need it).
So I'm prejudiced towards his works because of the writing.
It's dated in terms of technology and in social aspects and was jarring at times.
(And, in retreat from the latest great SFF hype, I ordered everything else he has written just in case I need it).
May 25, 2021
When a white woman staggers into a hospital injured from a carjacking with her 4 year old sleeping in the back, police mobilize in the projects where she reported it happened. Racial tensions are ignited. Parallels to certain S.I. events like Andre Rand and the Friends of Jennifer, were especially spooky.
March 30, 2014
Debo admitir que me costó más tiempo del que esperé, tardé en meterme en la trama y una vez pasado ‘el climax’ de la historia me perdieron de nuevo.
Me gustan las historias de investigación y ésta es una buena historia pero siento que tiene muchos elementos extra que nada pasaría si se eliminaran de la trama.
La historia empieza lenta y conforme avanza logra atraer más la atención: Una madre que sufre el robo de su auto donde va su hijo de 4 años, la ciudad se pone de cabeza buscándolo, la investigación no avanza, las teorías empiezan a apuntar hacia la propia madre y se toma como ‘sospechoso’ a cualquiera que se acerque en lo mínimo al perfil del ‘secuestrador’, se recurre a procedimientos ‘extra-judiciales’ y se logra una confesión, una triste confesión que comienza revelar lógica entre algunos acontecimientos y a reforzar la incoherencia que se veía en otros.
La ciudad se siente herida y ofendida, se toma como una lucha de razas y se exige reparación de daños, hay manifestaciones que terminan en más tragedias. Se pierde enfoque del objetivo principal, se hace como en todo una lucha de intereses. Llegando a un desenlace que podría tomarse como autoconclusivo, o quizá me faltó leer más entre líneas para descifrarlo bien, el final me atrapó por un segundo y me volvió a perder. En fin me gustaron algunas cosas y otras más me pasaron de largo.
Want to read
May 24, 2024Looks like the book was adapted into a movie - Freedomland (2006). Available on MAX. It was poorly rated.
From the NYTimes (May 12, 1998):
A decade ago, Tom Wolfe created a small literary storm when he declared that recent novelists had failed to grapple with the convulsive reality of contemporary America and that they needed to "head out into this wild, bizarre, unpredictable, Hog-stomping Baroque country of ours and reclaim it as literary property."
He was wrong then, ignoring a myriad of novels by the likes of Robert Stone, John Updike, Don DeLillo, Russell Banks and a host of others. And he is even more wrong today, as Richard Price's gripping new novel "Freedomland" so eloquently attests.
Since his first novel, "The Wanderers," appeared in 1974, Price has been practicing his own tough, gritty brand of social realism, specializing in urban portraits that are as unsentimental as they are capacious.
With "Freedomland" -- which is set in the same fictional New Jersey milieu as his last novel, "Clockers" -- he has given us a big, cinemascope thriller, a novel that captures the racial politics and media madness of the Age of O.J., a novel that transforms today's headlines into a forceful, harrowing drama.
"Freedomland" has the social detail (though none of the lugubriousness) of a Zola novel, the jazzy, synesthetic rhythms of a Scorsese film, the slangy street moxie of a Mamet play, and the dark, sardonic humor of Wilder's classic "Ace in the Hole." Besides that, it's a terrific read.
The basic premise of "Freedomland" will immediately remind the reader of two high-profile news stories: Susan Smith's phony 1994 assertion that her two sons had been abducted by a black carjacker, and Charles Stuart's phony 1989 assertion that his pregnant wife had been killed by a black assailant.
In the case of "Freedomland," a young white woman named Brenda Martin tells the police that she has been carjacked by a black man who drove off with her 4-year-old son, Cody, in the back seat. Her allegation immediately sets off a heated manhunt in a black housing project, which in turn sets off charges of racism and police brutality.
While this may sound like so much fodder for a television movie of the week, Price has not cobbled together a topical potboiler; he has used his keen novelistic eye to conjure up a richly textured world while using his tactical skills as a screenwriter ("The Color of Money," "Ransom," "Mad Dog and Glory") to create a fast-paced, tension-filled story that reads like a movie in prose.
One keeps on reading, less to find out whether Brenda is lying than to find out what consequences her allegations will have for everyone around her.
As he did in "Clockers," Price cuts back and forth between the points of view of two central characters: In this novel, Detective Lorenzo Council, a big-hearted, effusive man, known as Big Daddy around the projects for his tireless, avuncular presence (and suffering, as Strike did in "Clockers," from a physical ailment that points up his vulnerability and limitations), and Jesse Haus, a scrappy young reporter who lives off the police scanner, eager "to witness, to absorb, to taste human behavior in extremis."
Both Jesse and Lorenzo, of course, are determined to chase down Brenda's story and find her son, dead or alive. But while their mutual quest for the truth makes them allies of sorts, they are motivated by very different ends: Jesse wants to beat out the competition, to get the scoop of her life; Lorenzo wants to keep a lid on the racial tinderbox that is threatening to explode around him.
Both of them will also discover that the Brenda Martin case has an acutely personal meaning for them, that it will stir up emotions they thought they had long suppressed.
Price uses the stories of Lorenzo and Jesse to give the reader a wonderfully vivid insider's view of the methods used by police and reporters, and to explore both their own psychology and the psychology they practice on others.
His narrative is also peppered with the sort of small, telling details that make palpable the nervous arc of a crime investigation and the media storm that so often follows, delineating the frightening, snowballing rush of incident and outrage that unfurls, willy nilly, after Brenda's charges, enough fodder "for a dozen more marches, charges, countercharges, commissions, investigations, indictments, headlines, midnight negotiations and political swap meets."
Price shows us the roiling anger in the black housing project of Armstrong, as white police officers sweep through its streets in search of Brenda's carjacker. He shows us Lorenzo's increasingly fevered efforts to contain the emotions of cops and agitators alike.
He shows us the incendiary posturing of local politicians and militants as they try to exploit their constituents' anger for their own ends. And he shows us the increasingly frenzied efforts of Jesse and other members of the press to cover the accelerating story, and their own contributions to the ensuing mayhem.
Along the way, Price tosses off lots of sharp, hard-edged cameos that leave us with the sense that we know this community firsthand, that we know its troublemakers and peaceniks, its local eccentrics and hotheads, from Hootie Charles, a carjacker who has switched to lawn-furniture scams, to Millrose Carter, a Vietnam veteran known as "the Man Who Never Sleeps," from the Rev. Henry Longway, a local demagogue who's constantly organizing protests and marches, to Paul Rosenbaum, a lawyer known for championing "the desperate, the technically guilty, the occasionally framed, the submoronic, the psychopathic."
By the end of this novel, the reader has not only been thoroughly immersed in the story of Brenda Martin's missing child and the fallout of her allegations, but initiated, as well, into the history of this fictional New Jersey community and its legacy of crime and grief and rage.
Though there is a slight falling off at the end, a toying with sentimentality in the book's final pages, it's clear that with "Freedomland," Price has written his most powerful novel yet, a novel that in wrestling with what Tom Wolfe calls the "rude beast" of millennial America, holds up a dark mirror to our times.
From the NYTimes (May 12, 1998):
A decade ago, Tom Wolfe created a small literary storm when he declared that recent novelists had failed to grapple with the convulsive reality of contemporary America and that they needed to "head out into this wild, bizarre, unpredictable, Hog-stomping Baroque country of ours and reclaim it as literary property."
He was wrong then, ignoring a myriad of novels by the likes of Robert Stone, John Updike, Don DeLillo, Russell Banks and a host of others. And he is even more wrong today, as Richard Price's gripping new novel "Freedomland" so eloquently attests.
Since his first novel, "The Wanderers," appeared in 1974, Price has been practicing his own tough, gritty brand of social realism, specializing in urban portraits that are as unsentimental as they are capacious.
With "Freedomland" -- which is set in the same fictional New Jersey milieu as his last novel, "Clockers" -- he has given us a big, cinemascope thriller, a novel that captures the racial politics and media madness of the Age of O.J., a novel that transforms today's headlines into a forceful, harrowing drama.
"Freedomland" has the social detail (though none of the lugubriousness) of a Zola novel, the jazzy, synesthetic rhythms of a Scorsese film, the slangy street moxie of a Mamet play, and the dark, sardonic humor of Wilder's classic "Ace in the Hole." Besides that, it's a terrific read.
The basic premise of "Freedomland" will immediately remind the reader of two high-profile news stories: Susan Smith's phony 1994 assertion that her two sons had been abducted by a black carjacker, and Charles Stuart's phony 1989 assertion that his pregnant wife had been killed by a black assailant.
In the case of "Freedomland," a young white woman named Brenda Martin tells the police that she has been carjacked by a black man who drove off with her 4-year-old son, Cody, in the back seat. Her allegation immediately sets off a heated manhunt in a black housing project, which in turn sets off charges of racism and police brutality.
While this may sound like so much fodder for a television movie of the week, Price has not cobbled together a topical potboiler; he has used his keen novelistic eye to conjure up a richly textured world while using his tactical skills as a screenwriter ("The Color of Money," "Ransom," "Mad Dog and Glory") to create a fast-paced, tension-filled story that reads like a movie in prose.
One keeps on reading, less to find out whether Brenda is lying than to find out what consequences her allegations will have for everyone around her.
As he did in "Clockers," Price cuts back and forth between the points of view of two central characters: In this novel, Detective Lorenzo Council, a big-hearted, effusive man, known as Big Daddy around the projects for his tireless, avuncular presence (and suffering, as Strike did in "Clockers," from a physical ailment that points up his vulnerability and limitations), and Jesse Haus, a scrappy young reporter who lives off the police scanner, eager "to witness, to absorb, to taste human behavior in extremis."
Both Jesse and Lorenzo, of course, are determined to chase down Brenda's story and find her son, dead or alive. But while their mutual quest for the truth makes them allies of sorts, they are motivated by very different ends: Jesse wants to beat out the competition, to get the scoop of her life; Lorenzo wants to keep a lid on the racial tinderbox that is threatening to explode around him.
Both of them will also discover that the Brenda Martin case has an acutely personal meaning for them, that it will stir up emotions they thought they had long suppressed.
Price uses the stories of Lorenzo and Jesse to give the reader a wonderfully vivid insider's view of the methods used by police and reporters, and to explore both their own psychology and the psychology they practice on others.
His narrative is also peppered with the sort of small, telling details that make palpable the nervous arc of a crime investigation and the media storm that so often follows, delineating the frightening, snowballing rush of incident and outrage that unfurls, willy nilly, after Brenda's charges, enough fodder "for a dozen more marches, charges, countercharges, commissions, investigations, indictments, headlines, midnight negotiations and political swap meets."
Price shows us the roiling anger in the black housing project of Armstrong, as white police officers sweep through its streets in search of Brenda's carjacker. He shows us Lorenzo's increasingly fevered efforts to contain the emotions of cops and agitators alike.
He shows us the incendiary posturing of local politicians and militants as they try to exploit their constituents' anger for their own ends. And he shows us the increasingly frenzied efforts of Jesse and other members of the press to cover the accelerating story, and their own contributions to the ensuing mayhem.
Along the way, Price tosses off lots of sharp, hard-edged cameos that leave us with the sense that we know this community firsthand, that we know its troublemakers and peaceniks, its local eccentrics and hotheads, from Hootie Charles, a carjacker who has switched to lawn-furniture scams, to Millrose Carter, a Vietnam veteran known as "the Man Who Never Sleeps," from the Rev. Henry Longway, a local demagogue who's constantly organizing protests and marches, to Paul Rosenbaum, a lawyer known for championing "the desperate, the technically guilty, the occasionally framed, the submoronic, the psychopathic."
By the end of this novel, the reader has not only been thoroughly immersed in the story of Brenda Martin's missing child and the fallout of her allegations, but initiated, as well, into the history of this fictional New Jersey community and its legacy of crime and grief and rage.
Though there is a slight falling off at the end, a toying with sentimentality in the book's final pages, it's clear that with "Freedomland," Price has written his most powerful novel yet, a novel that in wrestling with what Tom Wolfe calls the "rude beast" of millennial America, holds up a dark mirror to our times.
October 14, 2015
Richard Price, where have you been all my life? Seriously, how could I have missed this guy for so long? His credentials include being the screenwriter for "The Color of Money", "Sea of Love" and "Ransom".
This novel is akin to a top-notch "Law and Order" miniseries, only more profound. His characters get under your skin in ways that make you think about them long after you put the book down. He's one of those writers that can make the setting a character, you know like Thomas Hardy does with the moors? Only here, it's the inner-city with its paradoxical hopelessness and optimism that only urban familiars will recognize.
The main plot involves a white woman walking into an ER saying she was carjacked by a black guy with her son in the back of the car and the racial tensions that erupt. And yet, there's so much more. Price explores themes of motherhood, of cynicism, of faith, of just what it means to be human. Masterful.
This novel is akin to a top-notch "Law and Order" miniseries, only more profound. His characters get under your skin in ways that make you think about them long after you put the book down. He's one of those writers that can make the setting a character, you know like Thomas Hardy does with the moors? Only here, it's the inner-city with its paradoxical hopelessness and optimism that only urban familiars will recognize.
The main plot involves a white woman walking into an ER saying she was carjacked by a black guy with her son in the back of the car and the racial tensions that erupt. And yet, there's so much more. Price explores themes of motherhood, of cynicism, of faith, of just what it means to be human. Masterful.
September 19, 2010
I was obsessed with Clockers after I slogged through it and got sucked in halfway through, so I had high hopes for Price's follow-up, which is set in the same fictional NJ town of Dempsy. Unfortunately it is a little overwrought and tends to rely a bit too much on Price's favorite device of ruined and abandoned places. My favorite scene in Clockers was the 'baby hospital' chapter, which literally took my breath away, but in Freedomland we see at least 2 scenes set in ruins, and it gets to be a bit much. Still, the descriptions of the abandoned theme park called Freedomland are quite haunting (note that this is based on an actual theme park called Freedomtown that used to be in the Bronx.) Price's books are no lightweights and this one is no different-- I could have done with a little less of Brenda's dialogue and a little more plot movement.
August 3, 2011
This novel is alive in ways that so many others aren't. Price digs in and explores every aspect of the tragedy at the center of this book through the eyes of his two main characters using a verbal writing style (deos that make sense?) that keeps things cooking but never feels rushed. His descriptions, his dialogue, his insight -- I came away from this book a better writer than when I went in.
May 7, 2016
The book was slow for the first half, but after that it was great. I'm glad I hung in there. The author has an annoying habit of putting commas in sentences where they don't belong and it's EVERYWHERE in the book. It jolted me out of the dream and I hated it. Otherwise, great story and well-drawn characters.
March 21, 2009
I heard the movie was terrible but don't let that scare you away. I read this when it came out and thought it was the best book I had read in years. The characters are alive and you can talk to them (scream at them).
March 6, 2016
Excellent theory of author which compels you to contemplate about your freedom.
December 30, 2024
Neću više uopšte da trošim reči na genijalnost RIčarda Prajsa. Uzmite, čitajte!
September 21, 2023
‘A TIPPING POINT”
Phew! ‘Freedomland’ is a tense, gritty, believable story right from the get-go. The book was published in 1998 and is still very relevant today. The characters are complex with positive and negative traits. The fictional New Jersey hellhole Dempsey is just across the Hudson River from New York City. Mr. Price infuses the storyline with quite a bit of racial tension between the two butting communities, Dempsey and Gannon. Dempsey is a poor black district while Gannon is a white blue-collar enclave. There is constant tension between the two areas including the police departments. The bloody traumatized Brenda Martin, who is white, stumbles into the local Dempsey hospital and claims she was assaulted by a black man who forced her out of her car and stole it. Her four-year-old son, Cody, was sleeping in the back of the car when the assailant took off with the vehicle. Quickly an intense search-and-rescue begins where the Armstrong projects are on a quasi-lockdown as cops swarm the area. To make matters worse, Brenda’s brother, Danny, is a hotheaded Gannon cop out for blood when he hears about his sister’s assault. As the second day of the investigation moves into the first day of July, the area is enduring sweltering heat and legions of men way too pumped up on showing they’re manly men.
Lorenzo Council is a black popular Dempsey cop who grew up in the poor crime-ridden projects named Armstrong where the assault took place. He is the first police officer to interview Brenda while she is at the hospital. The veteran cop sees all kinds of complications based upon her story and initially hopes that higher-ups will take the case away from him. The crime scene that night is total chaos. Gannon cops have swept into the area looking for vengeance, freelance reporters are scurrying around and causing problems, and the black residents are seriously ticked off at all the sudden harassment. The news media are presented as manipulative, remorseless, and parasitic. There is one reporter named Jesse Haus I found especially repulsive. Rumors keep spreading like wildfire in the tightknit slum and exacerbate the situation. There are no wild shoot-‘em-ups in it and the story is less a mystery than a character study of race relations, poverty, police culture, and the double standard when it comes to white or black victims. It includes coarse language including the N-word. Mr. Price’s novel also has interesting information about search parties, our nation’s history in warehousing of the mentally handicapped, and the complexities of pulling off a peaceful street demonstration.
‘Freedomland’ is one seriously bleak oppressive story. If Mr. Price has humor as part of his writing repertoire, it sure was not on display in this sucker. The 791-page book (mass market paperback) left me exhausted. There’s so much misery and anger in it. Once in awhile I stepped away from the book and looked at something that might make me laugh just to relieve my deepening funk. The writing is excellent but reading it to the end became an endurance test for me.
Phew! ‘Freedomland’ is a tense, gritty, believable story right from the get-go. The book was published in 1998 and is still very relevant today. The characters are complex with positive and negative traits. The fictional New Jersey hellhole Dempsey is just across the Hudson River from New York City. Mr. Price infuses the storyline with quite a bit of racial tension between the two butting communities, Dempsey and Gannon. Dempsey is a poor black district while Gannon is a white blue-collar enclave. There is constant tension between the two areas including the police departments. The bloody traumatized Brenda Martin, who is white, stumbles into the local Dempsey hospital and claims she was assaulted by a black man who forced her out of her car and stole it. Her four-year-old son, Cody, was sleeping in the back of the car when the assailant took off with the vehicle. Quickly an intense search-and-rescue begins where the Armstrong projects are on a quasi-lockdown as cops swarm the area. To make matters worse, Brenda’s brother, Danny, is a hotheaded Gannon cop out for blood when he hears about his sister’s assault. As the second day of the investigation moves into the first day of July, the area is enduring sweltering heat and legions of men way too pumped up on showing they’re manly men.
Lorenzo Council is a black popular Dempsey cop who grew up in the poor crime-ridden projects named Armstrong where the assault took place. He is the first police officer to interview Brenda while she is at the hospital. The veteran cop sees all kinds of complications based upon her story and initially hopes that higher-ups will take the case away from him. The crime scene that night is total chaos. Gannon cops have swept into the area looking for vengeance, freelance reporters are scurrying around and causing problems, and the black residents are seriously ticked off at all the sudden harassment. The news media are presented as manipulative, remorseless, and parasitic. There is one reporter named Jesse Haus I found especially repulsive. Rumors keep spreading like wildfire in the tightknit slum and exacerbate the situation. There are no wild shoot-‘em-ups in it and the story is less a mystery than a character study of race relations, poverty, police culture, and the double standard when it comes to white or black victims. It includes coarse language including the N-word. Mr. Price’s novel also has interesting information about search parties, our nation’s history in warehousing of the mentally handicapped, and the complexities of pulling off a peaceful street demonstration.
‘Freedomland’ is one seriously bleak oppressive story. If Mr. Price has humor as part of his writing repertoire, it sure was not on display in this sucker. The 791-page book (mass market paperback) left me exhausted. There’s so much misery and anger in it. Once in awhile I stepped away from the book and looked at something that might make me laugh just to relieve my deepening funk. The writing is excellent but reading it to the end became an endurance test for me.
December 28, 2018
Freedomland (1998) by Richard Price: A critical and commercial hit in 1998, Freedomland has lost none of its sting in the intervening decades. Maybe it's more relevant now in The Age of Trump than ever, dealing as it does with America's deep-seated racial divisions and unequal treatment at the hands of the law, media simplification of tragic events, knee-jerk bigotry, the politics of policing, and so many other 'Hot-button' topics.
A white woman stumbles into a hospital in New Jersey claiming to have been carjacked by an African-American man at the very border between the 'white' and 'black' sections of the New Jersey city. And her 4-year-old son was in the car.
What follows is more than 700 pages of tense, mournful, and sardonic prose. It's a thriller that takes its time drawing its characters and situations, its places and racial strife. That 700 pages covers just about 4 days of events.
It's all rendered in third-person narration that alternates its focus between Housing Project police officer Lorenzo Council and ambitious reporter Jesse Haus. The mother, Brenda Martin, is a major character as well -- really THE major character -- but she's observed entirely from without by Council and Haus.
This is the sort of big, ambitious, intimately epic popular novel that often out-survives and out-performs far more self-consciously 'literary' works. It's heart-rending though sometimes hopeful. Price, a screenwriter as well as a novelist, is a great writer of dialogue and of pungent, slyly metaphorical description. Freedomland is, quite simply, a Great American Novel, one that entertains and instructs in the way only the best Art does. Highly recommended.
A white woman stumbles into a hospital in New Jersey claiming to have been carjacked by an African-American man at the very border between the 'white' and 'black' sections of the New Jersey city. And her 4-year-old son was in the car.
What follows is more than 700 pages of tense, mournful, and sardonic prose. It's a thriller that takes its time drawing its characters and situations, its places and racial strife. That 700 pages covers just about 4 days of events.
It's all rendered in third-person narration that alternates its focus between Housing Project police officer Lorenzo Council and ambitious reporter Jesse Haus. The mother, Brenda Martin, is a major character as well -- really THE major character -- but she's observed entirely from without by Council and Haus.
This is the sort of big, ambitious, intimately epic popular novel that often out-survives and out-performs far more self-consciously 'literary' works. It's heart-rending though sometimes hopeful. Price, a screenwriter as well as a novelist, is a great writer of dialogue and of pungent, slyly metaphorical description. Freedomland is, quite simply, a Great American Novel, one that entertains and instructs in the way only the best Art does. Highly recommended.
June 17, 2024
7.5/10 - Frustratingly beautiful. Freedomland is a whopping 721 page roller coaster. Like Clockers and Lush Life, it's full of extended long scenes of dialog. In those other novels, this was used to great effect.
But in Freedomland, it often felt laborious. A number of times, I just wanted to know what happens next. Turning the page and seeing at least two more pages of uninterrupted dialog- sometimes 15+ pages- was the frustrating part.
That being said, I loved the descriptions of the New Jersey projects, the streets, the racial tensions. Lorenzo Council and Jesse Haus were both excellent main characters. Brenda Martin's near constant inner musings grated pretty quickly, but she was also a uniquely drawn presence.
The excessive ramblings of all the characters keep this from being a top read for me - just a bit too excessive. But it's still an excellent page-turner, and Richard Price has a way with words that ensures I'll keep reading his stuff.
================
'They're not married.' I say, 'How can you tell?' She says, 'Married people never touch in a heat wave.' I'll never forget that.
But in Freedomland, it often felt laborious. A number of times, I just wanted to know what happens next. Turning the page and seeing at least two more pages of uninterrupted dialog- sometimes 15+ pages- was the frustrating part.
That being said, I loved the descriptions of the New Jersey projects, the streets, the racial tensions. Lorenzo Council and Jesse Haus were both excellent main characters. Brenda Martin's near constant inner musings grated pretty quickly, but she was also a uniquely drawn presence.
The excessive ramblings of all the characters keep this from being a top read for me - just a bit too excessive. But it's still an excellent page-turner, and Richard Price has a way with words that ensures I'll keep reading his stuff.
================
'They're not married.' I say, 'How can you tell?' She says, 'Married people never touch in a heat wave.' I'll never forget that.
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