Suswatibasu (1703 KP) rated A Kind of Freedom: A Novel in Books
Nov 6, 2017 (Updated Nov 6, 2017)
In A Kind of Freedom, Sexton pursues a family’s history in a downward spiral, with three alternating plot lines that echo one another along the way. It begins with the budding love of Evelyn, brought up in New Orleans and the daughter of a Creole mother and black doctor father. She is courted by Renard, a poor man who works menial jobs to get by but aspires to study medicine. Their courtship reveals the strictures of a class- and colour-driven society that suffocates ambition and distorts desire.
The second generation is about Jackie, a single mother in 1980s New Orleans who is in love with her child’s father but afraid he will succumb to his crack addiction.
Eventually, we get to know Jackie’s son, T.C., in 2010, a young man at a turning point in his life. Through T.C.'s eyes, Sexton portrays a post-Katrina New Orleans where the smell of mold still lingers and opportunities for fast cash in the streets abound, as do the chances of getting shot or arrested.
It's an unflinching portrayal, slightly detached and not overbearing in its rhetoric. It shows where links have been bruised and sometimes broken, but dwells on the endurance and not the damage. A moving read.
The Most Wanted Man in China
Book
Fang Lizhi was one of the most prominent scientists of the People's Republic of China; he worked on...
Punk in the Gym
Book
Andy Pollitt is as close to a Hollywood A-lister as the climbing world will ever get. He had the...
Cold War Command: The Dramatic Story of a Nuclear Submariner
Book
The part played in the Cold War by the Royal Navy's submarines still retains a great degree of...
Deer Island
Book
At the beginning of the 1980s Neil Ansell chose a life of voluntary poverty working for the Simon...
Doddie: My Autobiography
Alex MacDonald and Sandy Jardine
Book
This is the autobiography of a Rangers legend. Alex MacDonald's compelling memoirs cover his...
Law, Legislation and Liberty: A New Statement of the Liberal Principles of Justice and Political Economy
Book
With a new foreword by Paul Kelly 'I regard Hayek's work as a new opening of the most fundamental...
Other People's Houses: How Decades of Bailouts, Captive Regulators, and Toxic Bankers Made Home Mortgages a Thrilling Business
Book
The clearest explanation yet of how the financial crisis of 2008 developed and why it could happen...
Fiber Lasers: Basics, Technology, and Applications
Dongmei Liang and Bryce Samson
Book
The fiber laser, with its humble beginning in the late 1980s, has undergone tremendous development...
Norwich City the Eighties
Edward Couzens-Lake, Mike Channon and Alan Bowkett
Book
The 1970s had been a generous decade to the Norfolk club. It had witnessed promotion to the top...