{"product_id":"freedomland-isbn-9780385335133","title":"Freedomland","description":"The celebrated author of \u003ci\u003eClockers\u003c\/i\u003e delivers his most compelling and accomplished novel to date.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eA 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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eSo begins Richard Price's electrifying new novel, a tale set on the same turf--Dempsey, New Jersey--as \u003ci\u003eClockers.\u003c\/i\u003e 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?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eRight 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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAs 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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAt once a suspenseful mystery and a brilliant portrait of two cities locked in a death-grip of explosive rage, \u003ci\u003eFreedomland\u003c\/i\u003e 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.\"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....a terrific read...Price has written his most powerful novel yet.\"\u003cbr\u003e--Michiko Kakutani, \u003ci\u003eNew York Times\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Praise for Richard Price and his work:\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Price shows that he's got the best equipment a novelist can have--that combination of muscularity, insight, and compassion we might call heart.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003e--Washington Post Book World\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Price pressure cooks the city down to its dense, searing essentials.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003e--Village Voice Literary Supplement\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Powerful...harrowing...a drama of quite remarkable complexity.\"\u003cbr\u003e--the \u003ci\u003eNew York Times\u003c\/i\u003e on \u003ci\u003eClockers\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"\u003ci\u003eClockers\u003c\/i\u003e is a great piece of work.\"\u003cbr\u003e--Tom WolfeRichard Price is the author of five previous novels; the most recent, \u003ci\u003eClockers,\u003c\/i\u003e was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award. He has also written numerous screenplays, including \u003ci\u003eSea of Love, Ransom,\u003c\/i\u003e and \u003ci\u003eThe Color of Money,\u003c\/i\u003e for which he received an Academy Award nomination. His work has appeared in many publications, including the \u003ci\u003eNew York Times\u003c\/i\u003e and \u003ci\u003eEsquire,\u003c\/i\u003e and he has taught fiction writing at Yale, NYU, and Columbia. He and his family live in Manhattan.The Convoy brothers, hanging in the soupy stifle of the One Building breezeway, were probably the first to spot her, and the spectral sight seemed to have frozen them in postures of alert curiosity--Caprice, sprawled down low in a rusted dinette chair, his head poked through the makeshift bib of a discarded shower curtain, and Eric, standing behind him, four fingers stalled knuckle-deep in a wide-mouthed jar of hairbraiding oil.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eShe was a thin white woman, marching up the steep incline from the Hurley Street end of the projects, appearing head first, like the mast of a sailing ship rounding the curve of the earth, revealing more of herself with each quick, stiff step across the ruptured asphalt oval that centered the Henry T. Armstrong Houses. That sloped and broken arena, informally known as the Bowl, was usually barren, but tonight it lay planted with dozens of new refrigerators awaiting installation, resting on their backs in open crates like a moonstruck sea of coffins.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Where she goin'.\" Eric said mildly.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe woman was carrying one arm palm up, cradled in the other like a baby.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eCaprice leaned forward in the chair. \"Bitch on a mission,\" he said, laughing.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Huh,\" Eric grunted, faint, tentative. It was a quarter past nine in the evening, the grounds mostly deserted because of the rally being held at the community center to solve the double homicide of Mother Barrett and her brother. But despite being in the wrong place at the wrong time, this white lady didn't seem right for a fiend--wasn't looking at them, looking for them. In fact, she was ignoring them, coming off neither dope-hungry nor afraid, just taking those brisk little steps and glaring at the ground in front of her with an expression somewhere between angry and stunned.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eTariq Wilkins, scowling in the swelter of this end-of-June Monday evening, came hunkering out of One Building, his hands crossed and buried in the armpits of his Devils jersey.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"That meeting over yet?\" he drawled. He took in the still-lit windows of the community center, made a clucking noise of annoyance.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eTariq, like Eric and Caprice and just about everybody else, knew who had killed the two old people exactly one year ago to the day. But also like everybody else, he was keeping it to himself, because what goes around comes around.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Look like a cemetery out there,\" Tariq said, gesturing to the mute field of refrigerators. Then he spotted her climbing the asphalt Bowl and reared back. \u003ci\u003e\"Daq . . .\"\u003c\/i\u003e His mouth hung open, his hands moving to the back pockets of his hang-dog jeans.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eShe wore dungarees with fresh dirt stains at the knees and a black T-shirt sporting the naggy legend IT TAKES A WEAK MAN TO DISRESPECT THE STRONG WOMAN WHO RAISED HIM. Her hair was shoulder-length and lank, her face pale and thin. She had no lips to speak of, but her eyes-- the building-mounted anti-crime spotlights picked them up as a startling electric gray, like a husky's, so light and wide as to suggest trance or blindness.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eShe came within conversational distance of them, and Tariq stepped parallel, sizing her up. \"What you lookin' for. . .\" he said. Then, just as Eric snagged his sleeve and pulled him back, he caught the reflection of something both bloody and glittering in her upturned palm.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWithout so much as a hitch in her stride, the woman sailed right past them and was gone--out of the Henry T. Armstrong Houses, the heart of that section of the city given the side-mouthed tags Darktown, D-Town, and into the world.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"What you be pulling on me. . .\" Tariq snapped, without any real heat, jerking his elbow high to free himself from Eric's grip.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eEric didn't answer, just got back to working on his brother's head. A withdrawn silence came down on all three of them now, each having caught sight of that cupped bloody dazzle, each of them pulling in, as if to be alone with his abrupt and mystifying discomfort.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe woman marched through the city of Dempsy on a determined diagonal, with the same pinched yet rapid stride with which she had climbed the Bowl, up and out of the Armstrong Houses. Cradling her arm, she tramped through red lights and green, the traffic next to nothing at this hour of the workweek. She walked through the parking lot of a Kansas Fried Chicken and across a deserted basketball court named after a local projects kid turned pro, the sodium lights casting her shadow to the Powell Houses behind the backboard. She marched across the diamond of a Little League field resting atop a fifty-year-old chromium dump, her face sullen yet tremulous, her light eyes fixed on the ground in front of her.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe fashion wave rippling through Darktown that summer was fat strips of metallic reflector tape slapped on jeans, sneakers, and shirts. As she approached the dingy yellow sizzle of JFK Boulevard--all storefront churches, smoke shops, and abandoned businesses--the agitated boredom, of the dope crews brought the street corners alive with restless zips of light.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eA patrol car slowed to profile her as she passed under a crude mural of a fetus with a crucifix sprouting from its navel. She raised her eyes, opened her mouth, and took a step in the car's direction. \"Give a saliva test to this one here,\" the driver murmured to his partner. But then she seemed to change her mind, quickly giving the cruiser her back and evaporating into a side street.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn a few more minutes she was striding across another ball field, this one also atop an old chromium dump, and then she was facing the Dempsy Medical Center, vast, Gothic, and half shut down, the emergency room entrance shedding the only eye-level light before the city hit the river. She finally came to a halt just outside the cone-shaped perimeter cast before the entrance like a spotlight on a bare stage.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eShe hesitated on the edge of the pale, one foot in, one out, her face taking on a sparkle of panic as she eyed the full-up benches of the waiting room through the gummy glass of the automatic doors. For a moment she froze but then seemed to get a grip, decisively rolling off to her left, turning the corner of the building, and descending to a more shadowed entrance at the bottom of a ramp. Walking through a partially raised roll-down gate, she stepped inside an empty, garishly lit room, the silence and stillness such that the buzzing of a fluorescent desk lamp could be heard twenty feet away.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAt first, as if disoriented by a sense of trespass, she appeared not to notice the overweight young black man on the gurney directly across the room from her. Once she caught sight of him she seemed unable to look away. He was barefoot but otherwise fully dressed--dead, the fatty tissue billowing out from the box-cutter slash under his chin like a greasy yellow beard. She stared at the pale-skinned soles of his feet as if hypnotized by this hidden whiteness, stood there staring until a stainless-steel freezer door opened directly across from her. A yellow-eyed middle-aged man in a hooded parka came into the room, instantly rearing back from her presence.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"You a relative?\" he asked, removing his coat. His eyes rose to something directly over her head.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eShe looked up to see a digital readout blinking \"115,\" then down to see that she was standing on a gurney-sized weighing platform set into the floor. When she looked back at the morgue attendant his eyes were on her hands.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"You in the wrong wing.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eStanding by the nurses station that fronted the medical center's ER, the security guard, a goateed, nose-ringed kid tricked out in a uniform like a full-bird colonel, eavesdropped on an overnatty detective. He was on the phone to report a shots-fired situation--one dead Rottweiler, the shooter getting his face resewn in one of the trauma rooms. \"A good shooting. Just thought you needed to know.\" Twenty feet down the corridor a sad-faced Pakistani leaned patiently against the wall, a bloody bath towel around his head, his ear in an ice-filled Ziploc bag.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThere was an abrupt rapping against the glass doors of the ambulance bay, and the guard turned to see the woman outside, trying to push her way in. His mouth in a twist, he brusquely signaled her to walk around to the main entrance, then resumed watching the free show in the hallways, zeroing in on a mush-mouthed drunk reclining, fully dressed, on a slant-parked gurney. The guy lay casually on his side, propped up on an elbow like a Roman senator, his head resting on the palm of his hand. Earlier in the evening, the story went, he had bitten down on a shot glass and added a three-inch extension to one side of his smile.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"I'm a alcoholic,\" the drunk said, having caught the guard's eye. \"I got me a big problem with that. Not a little problem, a \u003ci\u003ebig\u003c\/i\u003e problem. A goddamn \u003ci\u003eShop\u003c\/i\u003e Rite-sized problem. I ain't gonna lie about it.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe guard snorted and turned his attention to a bored correction officer on escort duty. He was doing half-assed push-ups against the wall while waiting for his charge to get the rest of his thumbnail removed.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eA nurse's aide, a round, bespectacled, almost elderly black woman with a bemused set to her mouth, slapped a blood-pressure cuff on the drunk.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"I need me something for the pain. I told you that, right?\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Right.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"I got to get some Percocets or something 'cause I can\u003ci\u003enot\u003c\/i\u003e stand pain and I got to get to work at 6:00 a.m. in the morning.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Yeah? What do you do.\" The nurse smirked.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"You don't want to know.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Well, I hope you don't drive no school bus.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Mommy, I got me a forty-thousand-dollar car, cash \u003ci\u003epaid.\u003c\/i\u003e I'm telling you, you \u003ci\u003edon't\u003c\/i\u003e want to know.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"You \u003ci\u003edon't\u003c\/i\u003e want to know,\" the nurse said, mocking him. \"I can\u003ci\u003enot\u003c\/i\u003e stand pain,\" she added mincingly. \"You want to know about pain, you have yourself a baby, then come talk to me about pain.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Hey, I had six--\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"No, \u003ci\u003eyou.\"\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Well, I was in the vicinity.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe security guard, laughing now, hands behind his back, took a spacey 360-degree spin on one heel, then came alert with irritation as that lady outside the ambulance entrance renewed her rapping on the door. He began to wave her around again but saw the blood smearing the glass and what looked like a palm full of jewels pressed against the pane.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe ambulance bay doors were opened by remote to let a uniformed cop out, and suddenly the woman was in the house.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eEyes unfocused, teeth chattering, she floated down the hall, ignoring the irritated shout \"Miss! Miss! Exc\u003ci\u003euse\u003c\/i\u003e me,\" a reproachful singsong from the nurses station. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eShe wandered down the hallway, past the examination rooms--surgery, trauma, medical, X ray--then, as if remembering something, abruptly wheeled around, inadvertently stepping into the startled embrace of the goateed security guard.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"You got to go out to triage just like everybody else,\" the kid lectured awkwardly, wincing at the sight of her uptumed palms, the things growing there. He steered her back past the nurses station to the dented, paint-chipped double doors that led to the waiting room. She went willingly at first but then suddenly, with an expression of disgust, twisted out of his grasp. Her supported arm fell from its cradle, the hand hanging from the wrist like a dead goose.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAn East Indian doctor, petite, slender, and almost prim in his self-possession, strolled down the hallway eating a sandwich. His face registered a look of grudging interest as he noticed the floppiness of the hand.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"What happened to you,\" he asked flatly, between bites, taking in the glassy dislocation of her eyes, the labored workings of her chest. His identification tag read \"Anil Chatterjee.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"He threw me down. I couldn't even get the \u003ci\u003ewords\u003c\/i\u003e out.\" Her voice was smoky and deep, vibrating with a kind of retroactive panic.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Down where.\" He lifted her limp hand, gently felt the outer wrist bones.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eShe ignored the question, her head jerking like a bird's.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"What happened to you.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eStill no response.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHe gave his sandwich to the security guard and took both her hands. Her palms were embedded with shards of glass, clear and beer-bottle green, bits of gravel, some rusted wedges of tin, sharp fragments of various colored plastic, and in one hand a fine, small coil of metal, the inner spring of a cheap ballpoint pen--all of it implanted in the red-and-blue rawness of abraded flesh.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"I want you to answer my question,\" he said sternly. \"What happened to you.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"He threw me out of the car . . .\" Suddenly she stomped her foot like a child, her voice soaring. \"I couldn't get the \u003ci\u003ewords\u003c\/i\u003e out! He didn't give me a chance! I tried, I swear to God!\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Threw you out. Was the car moving?\" Chatterjee gripped her above the wrists to prevent her from flailing and complicating the damage.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eShe turned away, her face bunching, tears popping like glass beads.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eCasually bypassing the screening drill, he walked her directly to the surgery room, escorting her in an awkward sideways scuttle, still holding her in that double-handed grip. The guard followed tentatively with the doctor's sandwich.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe surgery room was crowded, the floor sticky, littered with torn gauze wrappers. Along the walls, patients sat quietly. A frazzled doctor with a Russian accent held a bouquet of MRIs, CAT scans, and X rays to his chest and read out names, mail-call-style.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Salazar?\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eNo answer.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Vega?\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eTwo men, both wearing blood-drizzled shirts, cautiously raised their hands, then, noticing each other, simultaneously lowered them.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eChatterjee sat her on a backless stool and took her pulse, which was racing like a hummingbird. He strapped a blood pressure cuff on her arm, holding himself still. Ninety over seventy. The blood was probably somewhere in her feet at this point.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"I need to know what happened to you. I cannot treat you if I don't know what happened to you,\" he said, locking his eyes into hers, staring into that dazzling lupine gray.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eShe looked away again, exhaling in graduated shudders, trying.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"I was lost,\" she began, in that smoky, stunned vibrato. \"He said . . . he said he could help me get through the park. The guy, he didn't . . .\" Her voice fluttered away. \"He didn't even--I got out of the car, OK? He didn't even let me get a \u003ci\u003eword\u003c\/i\u003e out. He threw me down.\" She looked off, clenching her teeth.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Were you raped?\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eShe balled her impaled palms into white knots, blood dripping. Chatterjee quickly backed away to save his pants, then, leaning forward from a safe distance, forcibly pried her fingers open again. The security guard placed the doctor's sandwich on a stack of X rays and left the room.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Listen to me. I speak six different languages. Just answer in human range. Were you raped.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe triage nurse, a woman in her fifties with frosted red hair and a giant button reading \"#1 NANA\" pinned under her collar, slipped in behind Chatterjee. She held an admissions form on a clipboard. The doctor waited for an answer as the young woman looked at both of them with a pleading muteness. His gaze compulsively returning to those eyes, he nudged her stool with his knee, moving it along on its casters to a sink. He worked on a pair of latex gloves, then took one of her palms and began to wash it gently.","brand":"Delta","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46303752847589,"sku":"NP9780385335133","price":20.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780385335133.jpg?v=1767727678","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/es\/products\/freedomland-isbn-9780385335133","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}