Freedomland

商家名称	信用等级	购买信息	订购本书
		Freedomland
		Freedomland

基本信息·出版社：Bloomsbury Publishing Inc
·页码：560 页
·出版日期：2006年05月
·ISBN：0747574197
·条形码：9780747574194
·版本：2006-05-15
·装帧：平装
·开本：32开 Pages Per Sheet
·外文书名：自由之地

内容简介 Book Description
The celebrated author of Clockers delivers his most compelling and accomplished novel to date.

A white woman, her hands gashed and bloody, stumbles into an inner-city emergency room and announces that she has just been carjacked by a black man. But then comes the horrifying twist: Her young son was asleep in the back seat, and he has now disappeared into the night.

So begins Richard Price's electrifying new novel, a tale set on the same turf--Dempsey, New Jersey--as Clockers. Assigned to investigate the case of Brenda Martin's missing child is detective Lorenzo Council, a local son of the very housing project targeted as the scene of the crime. Under a white-hot media glare, Lorenzo launches an all-out search for the abducted boy, even as he quietly explores a different possibility: Does Brenda Martin know a lot more about her son's disappearance than she's admitting?

Right behind Lorenzo is Jesse Haus, an ambitious young reporter from the city's evening paper. Almost immediately, Jesse suspects Brenda of hiding something. Relentlessly, she works her way into the distraught mother's fragile world, befriending her even as she looks for the chance to break the biggest story of her career.

As the search for the alleged carjacker intensifies, so does the simmering racial tension between Dempsey and its mostly white neighbor, Gannon. And when the Gannon police arrest a black man from Dempsey and declare him a suspect, the animosity between the two cities threatens to boil over into violence. With the media swarming and the mood turning increasingly ugly, Lorenzo must take desperate measures to get to the bottom of Brenda Martin's story.

At once a suspenseful mystery and a brilliant portrait of two cities locked in a death-grip of explosive rage, Freedomland reveals the heart of the urban American experience--dislocated, furious, yearning--as never before. Richard Price has created a vibrant, gut-wrenching masterpiece whose images will remain long after the final, devastating pages.

Amazon.com
Actor Joe Morton takes on all the roles of this audiocassette's multicultural cast of characters. His grasp of New Jersey accents, dialects, and inflections is flawless, imbuing all of Richard Price's carefully drawn characters with a gritty sense of authenticity. Morton's crisp, controlled narration propels the story forward with taut, edgy suspense. As he reads, he glides effortlessly from his role as narrator to those of the main characters. Single mother Brenda Martin speaks with a breathy, stammering, and truly fear-permeated voice, while the introspective African American detective, Lorenzo Council, has a clipped, businesslike manner of speaking. Morton takes equal care in bringing to life Price's minor characters, whether portraying a no-nonsense, white New Jersey housewife whose voice has been made coarse by too many cigarettes, or an African American Muslim preacher whose commanding bass voice isn't quite powerful enough to spur his community to action. Morton's greatest achievement, however, is his characterization of Council's jaded, middle-aged white partner, Bump. When Morton slips into the role of Bump, his growling, Jersified Brooklynese is so startling, it almost seems that a life-long resident of Hoboken has stepped into the recording studio and appropriated Morton's microphone. The recording is slightly marred by occasional intrusions of synthesized music that are, for the most part, superfluous and distracting, but Morton's acting abilities and vocal agility are more than sufficient to keep any listener riveted. (Running time: four hours, four cassettes)
　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　--Elizabeth Laskey

Amazon.co.uk
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 colour from the crisis, never quite attains three dimensions--though 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 nobodycasts a colder or more accurate eye on our fin-de-siècle urban existence.

From Publishers Weekly
Set in the same blasted New Jersey ghetto as his much-admired Clockers (1992), Price's first novel since that bestseller is less a sequel than a monumental complement played in minor key, a re-visitation by an author who's older, sadder, wiser. The story flows from an event drawn from headlines: Brenda Martin, a white woman, staggers bleeding into a hospital to claim that her car has been hijacked by a black man?with her four-year-old son in the backseat. The jacking allegedly occurred in the park that divides the largely black city of Dempsey from the white-dominated city of Gannon. In response, Gannon cops seal off and invade D-Town, inflaming racial tensions and attracting an army of media. As in Clockers, Price again scans urban life through two protagonists, one black, one white?here, black Dempsey cop Lorenzo Council and white local reporter Jesse Haus. As both draw close to grief-crazed Brenda, one question propels the narrative: Is she telling the truth? The answer and its violent aftermath are equally inevitable, as Price snares the surface and the substance of America caught in a slow-motion riot of racial rage. His language is street-fresh, his dialogue as if eavesdropped; his characters are soulful, flawed, dead real. Price's experience as a screenwriter (The Color of Money, etc.) shows in the predictable dramatic arc of his tale, but the novel is no less powerful for its popular bent. Within its structural confines, the story line veers in unexpected directions, with each detour bringing readers closer to Price's ultimate vision?that our nation's hope lies not in social movements but in the flame of humaneness that flickers in each of us, cop and criminal, black and white. 125,000 first printing; $175,000 ad/promo; BOMC and QPB alternates; first serial to the New Yorker; film rights to Scott Rudin/Paramount for $2 million; simultaneous BDD audio; author tour.

From Library Journal
Price hits another home run with this follow-up to the critically acclaimed Clockers, set in the fictional city of Dempsy, NJ, a place that bears both spiritual and geographical similarities to Jersey City, NJ. At the tale's vortex is Brenda Martin, a fragile, white single mother who was apparently pulled from her car by a black male while driving through Dempsy's Armstrong housing project. When a hysterical Brenda blurts out that her four-year-old son was asleep in the back seat at the time of the carjacking, a swarm of reporters, cops, and the curious descend on Dempsy. With cops from neighboring Gannon?Brenda's hometown?aggressively laying seige to Armstrong, Dempsy detective Lorenzo Council, himself an Armstrong product, must negotiate a political and social minefield as racial animosities between Dempsy and Gannon threaten to explode. Price's characters are, as usual, dead-on, and the his eye for unflinchingly capturing humans at their very best?and very worst?is unrivaled. Highly recommended.
　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　Mark Annichiarico, "Library Journal"

From Kirkus Reviews
Another grimly convincing portrayal of inner-city despair from the multitalented author of such literate powerhouses as Bloodbrothers (1976) and Clockers (1992). The storys set, like Clockers, in the New Jersey hellhole of Dempsy, just across the Hudson from New York City, where welfare families, crackheads, and miscellaneous crazies jostle against one another in an ongoing state of simmering crisis punctuated by daily explosions of violence. When a traumatized single white mother, Brenda Martin, reports her car hijacked and her four-year-old son, asleep in the backseat, inadvertently kidnaped by a black man, veteran (black) detective Lorenzo Council and (white) newspaper reporter Jesse Haus are drawn deeply into the twin maelstroms of an already volatile populace further aroused by racial tension and their own separate suspicions about the veracity of Brenda's harrowing story. Again, as in Clockers, Price juxtaposes his two protagonists' experiences in a crisp and authoritative sequence of scenes that comprise a virtual primer on urban perils and survival skills; his cops are credibly exhausted and embittered, and his street people both defiantly savvy and long-suffering (only Karen Collucci, who spearheads a neighborhood ``group that searches for missing children,'' seems slightly overdrawn). Price renders with great power his characters' mingled emotions of loss, fear, fury, and regret, and his punchy, forthright style nicely accommodates inventive metaphors (at a crime scene, ``the media settlement . . . [resembled] a nineteenth century military encampment. The electronic gear hung on the fence like cartridge belts and canteens''). The novel (whose title denotes a rundown ``theme park'' where crucial climactic events occur) is both generously plotted and honestly attentive to the screwed-up lives of these marvelously realized people. Lorenzo is a triumph, and the embattled, defeated Brenda Martin a fascinatingly complex figure. A book that Raymond Chandler or James T. Farrell would have been proud to claim. (Film rights to Scott Rudin/Paramount Pictures; Book-of-the-Month Club/Quality Paperback Book Club alternate selection; $175,000 ad/promo; author tour)

From AudioFile
A white woman, bloody and in shock, stumbles into a hospital and claims that she has been car-jacked by a black manDand that her son is in the back seat. So begins the hunt for the culprit, and the truth, which slowly emerges. Joe Morton performs this complex mystery with a grace, squeezing emotions from all the characters. Dramatic music adds to the tension. A chilling tale of murder and deceit. M.B.K.

The New York Times Book Review, Francine Prose
Price's concern with getting things right, with setting a scene and then layering it with telling vignettes ... enables him to take us on persuasive tours of a wide range of places.

Entertainment Weekly, Tom De Haven
Engrossing and memorable Freedomland is also, be warned, a psychically draining work of fiction.

Book Dimension
length: (cm)19.7 　　　 　　　　　 　　　　　 width:(cm)12.8
作者简介 Richard Price is the author of five previous novels; the most recent, Clockers, was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award. He has also written numerous screenplays, including Sea of Love, Ransom, and The Color of Money, for which he received an Academy Award nomination. His work has appeared in many publications, including the New York Times and Esquire, and he has taught fiction writing at Yale, NYU, and Columbia. He and his family live in Manhattan.
媒体推荐 'A hugely ambitious, searing novel Freedomland is a dazzling novel and makes for compulsive reading' Glasgow Herald 'A compelling portrait of America's flipside and a novel that obliges you (as Dickens did) to engage with it Not since Toni Morrison's Beloved have I read a new novel with such emotional force' Independent 'Taut and pulsating like Steve Bochco writing scripts for NYPD Blue, Price's work patrols the margins of the American underclass' Daily Express 'Richard Price has the soul of a poet, the ear of a screenwriter and the narrative ambition of a classic urban realist. His novels are sprawling, lyrical, down 'n' dirty accounts of those whom the American Dream has passed by' Arena

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