Reviews for Freedom in the family

The average rating for Freedom in the family based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2018-05-16 00:00:00 Richard Slater I read this book in preparation for Tananarive Due being one of the Guests of Honor at WisCon, a feminist science fiction convention that tries to be progressive on many social justice issues, including race. This book alternates chapters that are written by Tananarive and her mother, Patricia Stephens Due, who was first jailed as a student protesting segregation in the 1960s. The book is a story of a family, of activism in a local community and how it knits you together with people you otherwise never would have met. It's a story about the toll activism can take on families, on individual people, on friendships, on health. It's also a story of how America has treated and continues to treat black people. I feel honored to have been able to read this book, as I feel it let me know and understand both authors in a way that reading someone's fiction cannot. (I'll still be trying Due's fiction, don't worry.) I think anyone would benefit from reading this, both for pleasure as it is well-written and interesting, as well as for necessity, as the history it describes is both shocking and inspiring, in laying out what all ordinary people are capable of doing for their societies.

Review # 2 was written on 2011-09-27 00:00:00 Charles Madison A very well done book about the Civil Rights fight in Florida. Yes, you read that right -- Florida. We think of "the South," i.e. Mississippi and Alabama, as the central locations of the fight for equal rights, but Patricia Stephens Due tells a compelling history of the fight in her home state that stands as strong as her neighbors to the north. I have read enough of the history of the Civil Rights era that for much of the book, I wasn't sure that reading this was adding to my general knowledge base. Certainly it taught me much about *Florida's* struggle to change (and it does this very well!), but I wasn't sure if it added any different perspective on the *general* time and fight. But as the book went on, I realized that it did offer two things that perhaps no other book I've read had offered. First, by offering both the mother's and the daughter's perspectives, we get a fascinating look at what Civil Rights work did to families, and we hear this from both sides. We hear what the children of Civil Rights activists absorbed from their parents, how they viewed the world, what fights they thought were fighting themselves, and what they thought should now be their due because of their parents' activities. This was utterly fascinating, once it occurred to me to pay attention. (It was there all along; I just focused on it more partway through the book once it dawned on me that this book had this as an unusual gift to the reader.) The second gift that this book brings that very few books about the Civil Rights fight brings is that the authors tracked down many, many of the activists from that era during the researching of the book (I'm sure this is common) and not only told the story of the fight *back then,* but also tell us about what the fight back then means to them *now.* We hear about the cost, in physical health, family, mental health, and many other ways, that these fighters paid in order to change a broken system. I don't think I know of a single other book that does that, besides _The Rebellious Life of Rosa Parks_. We need to hear more of this. Fighters gave everything, not only during that era, but for decades after. All in all, an amazing book.