Reviews for Freedom rising

The average rating for Freedom rising based on 2 reviews is 5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2020-03-10 00:00:00 Dddd Ddddddddddd In the 1970s, a young man known as James North waited quietly at a border crossing station where his travel documents and visa were being analyzed. He had only intended to stay in South Africa for perhaps a year, just to write articles for a few newspapers and magazines. Instead, he would spend four and a half years in South Africa, traversing a land of bizarre contradictions and watching history unfold before his eyes. His travels and his memories of the hundreds of people whom he met along the way is told in Freedom Rising, a detailed account of his stay in a country that was on the brink of war. North traversed the land of South Africa far and wide, travelling the equivalent of one journey around the whole globe. He met hundreds of people of all races, classes, and beliefs. His account digs deeper into South African society, showcasing a country where unrivaled prosperity and wealth can sit right next to an abyss of destitution and poverty, and a country that will give a human being the dignity and respect that he/she deserves, but only if he/she is viewed by the regime as having the “right colored skin.” He exposes the tyrannical system of oppression known as apartheid, a system that empowers white people to soaring heights while trapping black people, Indians, and “colored” people (multiracial people) in a cycle of poverty and repression. He talks with freedom fighters of all races, people who have dedicated their lives to overthrowing a racist, oppressive system that would make the Jim Crow laws look like a paradise for black people. Likewise, he also talks with the conservatives and vile racists willing to defend the system, showing the extent of the actions the regime has taken to make the suffering of fellow human beings feel “normal” to the white populace, as well as the non-white populace. North recounts the suffering and obstacles that black, multiracial, Indian people face due to apartheid, from cruel forced relocations to resource-poor areas known as “Bantustans” to prison sentences for the smallest misnomers and for crimes illegal nowhere else in the world., and he tells of the relentlessness of the regime to silence anyone who may be anti-apartheid. The tone of this book is somber and serious, recounting a story of a system that denies millions of people an identity. However, it still sprinkles in optimism. Many of the people that North talks with don’t believe change will come quickly, and some believe that “ ‘nothing will get better here.’ ” (Mrs. Margaret Mpanza while talking to North, p.99) However, in the second preface of the book, North cheerfully states that his friends “have often accused [him] of being too optimistic.” (North, Preface to the Second Edition). This book caught my attention pretty early, and when I was hooked, I couldn’t stop reading it. I was vividly drawn in to the bizarre and horrifying world that is apartheid in South Africa. This book exposed me to the suffering that people of color experienced in apartheid South Africa. I swiftly moved against the cruel Bantustan system, and the appalling conditions that non-white people lived in was virulently condemned in my mind. The book resonated with me in a way no other high-interest nonfiction book could ever. I would recommend this book to every single person on this planet who are horrified by the disease that is racism.

Review # 2 was written on 2012-11-15 00:00:00 Jon Hutchinson A collection of Breytenbach's essays from before his journey through prison, headed by the title "Blind Bird," and from after his prison stint, headed by "Burnt Bird," these are great snapshots in essay form of Breytenbach's fiery career: a restless critic, a stridently antiapartheid voice, a poetic innovator, a thoughtful & passionate writer. Across the span of the collection they also help illustrate his self-acknowledged transformation from sightless to scorched or, in other words, from an idealist and humanist writer earnestly taking on the troubles of his world to a more embittered, wary voice paradoxically more open to humanism, if a humanism of a different kind. Life is not entirely correct or tender in its treatment of the human. Put another way: characteristic of the human condition is that you are a broken rhythm, that time catches up with you, that you quite simply develop too tardily to be able to digest effectively the dollops of 'liberated' wisdom you may have managed to imbibe through a tight gullet. / Everywhere around you, like tiny unscripted fables, you become aware of the paradoxes and the ironies of the matter... Not yet at the sophistication and organic development of prose found in the later Intimate Stranger, this is nevertheless a good vision of the poet's developing prose style and poetics.