Richard Price

Novelist and Academy Award-nominated screenwriter Richard Price's bestselling second novel offers "an unforgettable picture of inner-city decay and despair" (USA Today) At once an intense mystery and a revealing study of two men, a veteran homicide detective and an innercity crack dealer, on opposite sides of an endless war. Clockers is "powerful . . . harrowing . . . remarkable" (The New York Times Book Review).

Thirty-five years into his research among the descendants of rebel slaves living in the South American rain forest, anthropologist Richard Price encountered Tooy, a priest, philosopher, and healer living in a rough shantytown on the outskirts of Cayenne, French Guiana. Tooy is a time traveler who crosses boundaries between centuries, continents, the worlds of the living and the dead, and the visible and invisible. With an innovative blend of storytelling and scholarship, "Travels with Tooy" recounts the mutually enlightening and mind-expanding journeys of these two intellectuals. Included on the itinerary for this hallucinatory expedition: forays into the eighteenth century to talk with slaves newly arrived from Africa; leaps into the midst of battles against colonial armies; close encounters with double agents and femme fatale forest spirits; and trips underwater to speak to the comely sea gods who control the world's money supply. This enchanting book draws on Price's long-term ethnographic and archival research, but above all on Tooy's teachings, songs, stories, and secret languages to explore how Africans in the Americas have created marvelous new worlds of the imagination.

Thirty-five years into his research among the descendants of rebel slaves living in the South American rain forest, anthropologist Richard Price encountered Tooy, a priest, philosopher, and healer living in a rough shantytown on the outskirts of Cayenne, French Guiana. Tooy is a time traveler who crosses boundaries between centuries, continents, the worlds of the living and the dead, and the visible and invisible. With an innovative blend of storytelling and scholarship, "Travels with Tooy" recounts the mutually enlightening and mind-expanding journeys of these two intellectuals. Included on the itinerary for this hallucinatory expedition: forays into the eighteenth century to talk with slaves newly arrived from Africa; leaps into the midst of battles against colonial armies; close encounters with double agents and femme fatale forest spirits; and trips underwater to speak to the comely sea gods who control the world's money supply. This enchanting book draws on Price's long-term ethnographic and archival research, but above all on Tooy's teachings, songs, stories, and secret languages to explore how Africans in the Americas have created marvelous new worlds of the imagination.

"Greenfields" is a lyrical document of growing up in a quiet but fast-changing corner of Scotland caught at various stages in the last decades of the twentieth century. This collection reclaims suburbia - "the rurban" as Price prefers to call it - as a place of unexpected poetry. Alive to the downsides of "dormitory towns", "Greenfields" evokes the bittersweet qualities of places that are neither quite urban nor quite rural but have in fact a fascinating hybridity, even beauty. As with the acclaimed "Lucky Day", this collection is particularly sensitive to the nuances of family relationships, but new here is an uncanny evocation of a child's developing perspective of friends, siblings and parents. The theme of a modern territory superimposed onto a much older one, hinted at in "Lucky Day", is more fully developed now as Price elegises the ancient landscape of the little-known county of Renfrewshire, southwest of Glasgow. Several kinds of time - geological, dynastic, family, and lovers' time - are set against the rapacious speed of modernity as construction and telecoms transform whole ways of life. Price is also confirmed in this book as a love poet of great delicacy. In the sequence that braids many of his concerns together, Tube Shelter Perspective, he demonstrates that he is a writer, in the words of John Kinsella, who "has given late modernism an injection of humanity it has long required."

An election day massacre in colonial Martinique. A “mad” artist who lives in a cave. A satirical wooden bust of a white colonel. The artist’s banishment to the Devil’s Island penal colony for “impertinence.” And a young anthropologist who arrives in Martinique in 1962, on the eve of massive modernization. In a stunning combination of scholarship and storytelling, the award-winning anthropologist Richard Price draws on long-term ethnography, archival documents, cinema and street theater, and Caribbean fiction and poetry to explore how one generation’s powerful historical metaphors could so quickly become the next generation’s trivial pursuit, how memories of oppression, inequality, and struggle could so easily become replaced by nostalgia, complicity, and celebration.“A superb callaloo of a book. . . . Richard Price has a remarkable grasp of the literatures of the Caribbean, and draws on this resource to explore the underlying insanity of the colonial experience, as well as the bewildering complexities of the postcolonial world where memory is erased or invented according to the demands of a market modernity.”-George Lamming, author of The Pleasures of Exile“By beautifully crafting elements as disparate as biographical data, sociological studies, literary sources, and archival documents, Richard Price’s research is more fascinating than a piece of fiction.”-Maryse CondÉ, author of I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem“Price does it again. Mixing eras, genres, and voices, he carries the reader through the contradictory streams of historical consciousness in the Caribbean island of Martinique. The result is as complex and as enticing as the sea it evokes.”-Michel-Rolph Trouillot, author of Silencing the Past“Filled with insights that are at once theoretical, methodological, and ethnographic, The Convict and the Colonel is required reading for anyone interested in colonialism, memory, and contemporary Caribbean societies.”-Jennifer Cole, American Ethnologist

First published in 2006. This study looks at a time when Victorian Britain was a time for self-doubt. There was an increasing fear that the 'place in the sun' that had so long been hers was being shadowed by the rising powers of Germany and the United States of America. Doubts arouse about her economic strength, her military prowess, even the viability of the two-party system. The South African War of 1899-1902 served for a time as the focus for all the fears that many Britons had about their country's future. The patriotism it engendered was exaggerated by the early military failures to resolve the problem of the troublesome Boers. The focus of the text is on working-class attitudes and reactions to the Boer War 1899-1902.

An injured woman stumbles into an inner-city hospital with a horrifying story: she has just been carjacked by a man who was apparently unaware that her son was asleep on the back seat. As a search ensues, a shrewd detective and an ambitious young reporter smell a hoax and begin to suspect that the woman is holding back a terrible truth: could she have murdered her own child?

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.

The author of 12,000 Miles in the Nick of Time and Gojiro collects the best writings from his years as journalist on the beat in this poignant snapshot of New York City and a generation, with pieces on politics, sports, celebrity, the arts, and more. Original.

The Wanderers, a teenage gang in the Bronx of the early 1960s, are just trying to stay alive - and maybe have a little sex. But it's not going to be easy. They're facing murderous parents, unimpressed girls, an all-Chinese gang and a pack of mute Irish maniacs, apathetic teachers, and a ten-year-old cold-blooded killer. Against these odds, will the Wanderers get what they're after?

Leaving his successful career in L. A., Ray Mitchell returns to New Jersey to the housing project where he grew up to re-evaluate his life, reconnect with his daughter, and give something back to the community, but when he is found savagely beaten--and refuses to press charges--childhood friend Detective Nerese Ammons must uncover the truth. Reprint. 60,000 first printing.

A classic of historical anthropology, First-Time traces the shape of historical thought among peoples who had previously been denied any history at all. Each page of the book presents a transcript of oral histories told by living Saramakas about their eighteenth-century ancestors along with commentary from Price that places their accounts into a broader historical context.

Richard Price here offers a sweeping new interpretation of modern British history. He challenges the dominant assumption that the nineteenth century marked the beginning of modern Britain. British Society argues on the contrary that nineteenth-century British society was the extension of an earlier era whose main themes first appeared in the late seventeenth century and which continued to shape the social, economic and political history of the country until the end of the nineteenth century. This book casts a new light on the main themes of economic, political and social history, and offers new interpretations on questions and issues that are central to the history of modern Britain. It follows in the great tradition of works such as Briggs’s Age of Improvement, and Perkin’s Origins of Modern English Society, and will be of enormous interest to all students and scholars of the period.