Best Selling Books by Richard Price

Ray Mitchell, a former TV writer who has left Hollywood under a cloud, returns to urban Dempsy, New Jersey, hoping to make a difference in the lives of his struggling neighbors. Instead, his very public and emotionally suspect generosity gets him beaten nearly to death. Ray refuses to name his assailant, which makes him intensely interesting to Detective Nerese Ammons, a friend from childhood, who now sets out to unlock the secret of his reticence. Set against the intensely realized backdrop of urban America, the cat and mouse game that unfolds is both morally complex and utterly gripping.

In "Lush Life," Price tears the shiny veneer off the "new" New York to show the underground networks of control and violence beneath the glamour, in this novel that reads like a movie in prose" ("New York Times").

Richard Price was a loyal, although dissenting, subject of Great Britain who thought the British treatment of their colonies as wrong, not only prudentially, financially, economically, militarily, and politically, but, above all, morally wrong. He expressed these views in his first pamphlet early in 1776. It concluded with a plea for the cessation of hostilities by Great Britain and reconciliation. Its analyses, arguments, and conclusions, however, along with its admiration for the colonists, their moral position and qualities, could hardly fail to contribute to their reluctant recognition that there was no real alternative to independence. Price found some of his views not only misunderstood but vilified by negative critics in the ensuing controversy. So he wrote a second pamphlet which was published in early 1777. He expanded his analysis of liberty, extended its application to the war with America, and greatly expanded his discussion of the economic impact upon Great Britain. After the war, in 1784, he published a third pamphlet on the importance of the American Revolution and the means of making it a benefit to the world, appending an extensive letter from the Frenchman, Turgot. Implicitly the letter regards Price as a perceptive theorist of the revolution; explicitly it identifies the problems facing the prospective new nation and expresses a wish that it will fulfill its role s the hope of the world. Selections in the appendices present a part of the pamphlet controversy and the selection of correspondence shows how seriously Price was regarded by Revolutionary leaders.

Kenny Becker just dumped his girlfriend--the reasons are a little complex. Young and newly unemployed, his main assets at the moment are six-pack abs and a healthy libido--he''s ready to get out, find a little action, and maybe find himself too. But New York is no place for the lonely, and with one meaningless sexual encounter after another, Kenny begins to wonder if the singles scene is not itself a complete con job, with his heart and his future at stake. Raunchy, funny, and surprisingly heartfelt, this 1978 clubland slice-of-life displays Richard Price in gritty good form.

Award-winning author Richard Price offers a viscerally affecting and accomplished portrait of inner-city America.Veteran homicide detective Rocco Klein''s passion for the job gave way long ago. His beat is a rough New Jersey neighborhood where the drug murders blur together ... until the day Victor Dunham -- a twenty-year-old with a steady job and a clean record -- confesses to a shooting outside a fast-food joint. It doesn''t take long for Rocco''s attention to turn to Victor''s brother, a street-corner crack dealer named Strike who seems a more likely suspect for the crime. At once an intense mystery, and a revealing study of two men on opposite sides of an unwinnable war, "Clockers" is a stunningly well-rendered chronicle of modern life on the streets.

Brenda Martin stumbles into a city hospital and states a black man hijacked her car with her young son asleep in the back seat. The police tear the city apart looking for the child, only to find the story may be a lie.

The Wanderers, a teenage gang in the 1960s Bronx, are coming of age and drifting apart. Tormented by cold-hearted girls and cold-blooded ten-year-olds, maniacal gangs and murderous parents, they are caught between the juveniles and the adults. This is the acclaimed writer''s first book, which he wrote when he was only twenty-four, and the basis for a major feature film.

Richard Price (1723-1791) was an eminent Welsh philosopher and Dissenting Minister who won considerable fame as a supporter of the American and French Revolutions. The volume is comprised of his most important pamphlets (1759-1789).

In the early 18th century, the Dutch colony of Suriname was the envy of all others in the Americas. There, seven hundred Europeans lived off the labor of over four thousand enslaved Africans. Owned by men hell-bent for quick prosperity, the rich plantations on the Suriname river became known for their heights of planter comfort and opulence--and for their depths of slave misery. Slaves who tried to escape were hunted by the planter militia. If found they were publicly tortured. Gradually slaves began to form outlaw communities until nearly one out of every ten Africans in Suriname was helping to build rebel villages in the jungle. This book relates the history of a nation founded by escaped slaves deep in the Latin American rain forest. It tells of their battles for independence, their uneasy truce with the colonial government, and the attempt of their leader, Alabi, to reconcile his people with white law and a white God.

The recent success of Freedomland and Clockers has established Richard Price as one of America''s most accomplished novelists. Critics have praised both his uncanny ear for the cadences and pitch of dialogue and his insight into the deeper recesses of the American soul. Perhaps more than any novelist today, Price has captured the undercurrents of our culture and society. Bringing these talents to the art of screenplays, Price has also emerged as one of the foremost talents in screenwriting. Now, with this collection of his three best-known screenplays, readers can see for themselves why many movie critics have come to consider Richard Price today''s most preeminent screenwriter. Introduced with a revealing interview of Price by the critic Neal Gabler, this volume includes Price''s screenplays for The Color of Money (1986), which starred Paul Newman and Tom Cruise and won an Academy Award nomination for best screenplay; Sea of Love (1989), which starred Al Pacino and Ellen Barkin and became a major critical and commercial success; and Night and the City (1992), which starred Robert De Niro and Jessica Lange and again attracted rave reviews for Price''s screenwriting.

Eighteen-year-old Stony De Coco, expected to fulfill his father''s dream by joining the electrician''s union, longs for escape but feels trapped by his obligations to his working-class family.

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

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.

By the co-writer of the HBO miniseries The Night Of Richard Price''s New York Times bestseller, The Whites, is an electrifying tale of a New York City police detective under siege-by an unsolved murder, by his own dark past, and by a violent stalker seeking revenge. Back in the run-and-gun days of the mid-1990s, when a young Billy Graves worked in the South Bronx as part of an aggressive anti-crime unit known as the Wild Geese, he made headlines by accidentally shooting a ten-year-old boy while struggling with an angel-dusted berserker on a crowded street. Branded as a loose cannon by his higher-ups, Billy spent years enduring one dead-end posting after another. Now in his early forties, he has somehow survived and become a sergeant in Manhattan Night Watch, a small team of detectives charged with responding to all post-midnight felonies from Wall Street to Harlem. Mostly, his unit acts as little more than a set-up crew for the incoming shift, but after years in police purgatory, Billy is content simply to do his job. Then comes a call that changes everything: Night Watch is summoned to the four a.m. fatal slashing of a man in Penn Station, and this time Billy''s investigation moves beyond the usual handoff to the day tour. And when he discovers that the victim was once a suspect in the unsolved murder of a twelve-year-old boy-a savage case with connections to the former members of the Wild Geese-the bad old days are back in Billy''s life with a vengeance, tearing apart enduring friendships forged in the urban trenches and even threatening the safety of his family. Razor-sharp and propulsively written, The Whites introduces Harry Brandt--a new master of American crime fiction.

Cultural Vitality in the African Diaspora Lavishly illustrated with more than 350 images, this groundbreaking new book traces traditions in woodcarving, textiles, clothing, and jewelry created by the Maroon people of Suriname and French Guiana.

When Richard and Sally Price stepped out of the canoe to begin their fieldwork with the Saamaka Maroons of Suriname in 1966, they were met with a mixture of curiosity, suspicion, ambivalence, hostility, and fascination. With their gradual acceptance into the community they undertook the work that would shape their careers and influence the study of African American societies throughout the hemisphere for decades to come. In Saamaka Dreaming they look back on the experience, reflecting on a discipline and a society that are considerably different today. Drawing on thousands of pages of field notes, as well as recordings, file cards, photos, and sketches, the Prices retell and comment on the most intensive fieldwork of their careers, evoke the joys and hardships of building relationships and trust, and outline their personal adaptation to this unfamiliar universe. The book is at once a moving human story, a portrait of a remarkable society, and a thought-provoking revelation about the development of anthropology over the past half-century.

Rainforest Warriors is a historical, ethnographic, and documentary account of a people, their threatened rainforest, and their successful attempt to harness international human rights law in their fight to protect their way of life—part of a larger story of tribal and indigenous peoples that is unfolding all over the globe. The Republic of Suriname, in northeastern South America, contains the highest proportion of rainforest within its national territory, and the most forest per person, of any country in the world. During the 1990s, its government began awarding extensive logging and mining concessions to multinational companies from China, Indonesia, Canada, and elsewhere. Saramaka Maroons, the descendants of self-liberated African slaves who had lived in that rainforest for more than 300 years, resisted, bringing their complaints to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. In 2008, when the Inter-American Court of Human Rights delivered its landmark judgment in their favor, their efforts to protect their threatened rainforest were thrust into the international spotlight. Two leaders of the struggle to protect their way of life, Saramaka Headcaptain Wazen Eduards and Saramaka law student Hugo Jabini, were awarded the Goldman Prize for the Environment (often referred to as the environmental Nobel Prize), under the banner of "A New Precedent for Indigenous and Tribal Peoples." Anthropologist Richard Price, who has worked with Saramakas for more than forty years and who participated actively in this struggle, tells the gripping story of how Saramakas harnessed international human rights law to win control of their own piece of the Amazonian forest and guarantee their cultural survival.

This is a combined publication of two pamphlets published by the Welsh philosopher Richard Price. In early 1776 he published ''Observations on the Nature of Civil Liberty, the Principles of Government, and the Justice and Policy of the War with America''. Sixty thousand copies of this pamphlet were sold within days; and a cheap edition was issued which sold twice as many copies. It is said that his pamphlet had a part in determining the Americans to declare their independence. A second pamphlet on the war with America and the debts of Great Britain, followed in the spring of 1777. Price was a consistent critic of war in general and the corrupting effects of growing government debt.

First published in 1784, this tract defined American rights against Britain but also criticised America''s system of racial slavery.

A classic of historical anthropology, First-Time traces the shape of historical thought among peoples who had previously been denied any history at all. The top half of each page presents a direct transcript of oral histories told by living Saramakas about their eighteenth-century ancestors, "Maroons" who had escaped slavery and settled in the rain forests of Suriname. Below these transcripts, Richard Price provides commentaries placing the Saramaka accounts into broader social, intellectual, and historical contexts. First-Time''s unique style of presentation preserves the integrity of both its oral and documentary sources, uniting them in a profound meditation on the roles of history and memory. This second edition includes a new preface by the author, discussing First-Time''s impact and recounting the continuing struggles of the Saramaka people.