Random Family
Book description
Part 'EastEnders', part 'NYPD Blue', 'Random Family' is compelling and tense. It teems with passion, pain and pleasure, and shows us teen drug dealers with incredible organisational and financial skills, thirteen-year-olds having babies to keep their boyfriends interested, and incarcerated men who find life's first peace in solitary confinement. It's…
Why read it?
2 authors picked Random Family as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?
If you, like me, believe in the universality and power of ordinary people’s lives, then this book is essential. LeBlanc spent 11 years reporting it, practically living with the people who would become its main characters and who she followed as they sold drugs, went to prison, got pregnant, committed murder, and went on with their lives.
The only downside to reading this as a fellow journalist is that it is so awe-inspiring as to be intimidating and makes you want to hang it up and do something else.
From Sune's list on nonfiction stories that can rival any novel.
Random Family is a family saga; the story of two couples and their friends and families struggling to survive in the Bronx and upstate New York.
The author, Adrian Nicole LeBanc, spent years living alongside her subjects, which allowed her to paint an extraordinarily intimate portrait of the web of gangs, drugs, parenthood, poverty, and prison that dominated their lives.
I play a small role in the story, as I represented one of the people depicted in the book in a lawsuit brought against a prison guard.
Reading the book was, therefore, a personal revelation—illuminating the rich and complex context…
From Joanna's list on the human toll of the criminal justice system.
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