[JNY]≫ PDF Clockers Richard Price 9780747562733 Books

Clockers Richard Price 9780747562733 Books

Download As PDF : Clockers Richard Price 9780747562733 Books

Clockers Richard Price 9780747562733 Books

Great book, terrible Kindle edition. It was like they just put the book on a scanner, poured whisky all over it and let 'er rip. Throughout the book, for example, "clocker" is almost always written as "docker," apostrophes and commas cover each other's shifts, and sometimes I really don't know if an unfamiliar word is some street talk or my Kindle slurring away at the story.

Again, a great book! I just wish I hadn't wasted my money on the Kindle edition. And I'm beginning to wonder if I feel the same way about the Kindle as a whole if this is the quality of editing that goes into these books.


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Clockers Richard Price 9780747562733 Books Reviews

The two main characters are veteran homicide detective and a 19-year-old who runs a crew of drug sellers at a public housing complex. We follow both, including their thoughts and feelings as they navigate through their respective worlds. The emphasis is on characters, though there is. Meandering plot involving several murders and the stressful positions the characters and put in as a result. This is a book about the challenge of living a moral life when put in a position in which it is nearly impossible to do so.
I'll admit, I don't read a lot of fiction; most books just can't hold my attention that long. "Clockers," however, was without a doubt an exception to that rule. The book was apparently the inspiration for HBO's hit series, The Wire. If you enjoyed that show, you will unquestionably love this book (and if you love the book, you need to check out the show).

The realism depicted on the pages also cannot go without mentioning first. Most people regard the inner-city as a simple and vague concept of poverty and crime. After reading this book, you cannot walk away without having a much deeper understanding of the systemic and cyclical tragedy that engulfs the ghettos of America. From the overall story-line to the inner dialog, it is hauntingly realistic.

The two main characters that the book follows (Strike and Rocco) are incredibly well developed. It may be a cliche thing to say but I felt like I knew them both after just a few chapters. Price has a remarkable ability to suck the reader in, making you sympathetic to both characters for completely different, yet validating reasons.
This is an impressive piece of literature and I wonder why I was not aware of its existence until suggested it to me (when I was checking for recent books by another Richard, Richard Morgan!). Guessing from the summary it could be of interest and from comments it was sort of a classic, I ordered it more or less on a whim. It took me a few pages to realise the plot was deeply set in the 1990’s, not only because this was the high of the crack epidemics, but also since the characters (drug dealers and policemen) therein are all using beepers, instead of cellphones, and street phone booths).

The plot of Clockers is vaguely a detective story as an aging and depressed homicide officer, Rosso, hunts the murderer of a drug dealer, being convinced from the start that the self-declared murderer Victor did not do it. In parallel, and somewhat more closely, the book follows the miserable plight and thoughts and desires of Victor’s brother, Strike, who is head of a local crack dealing network, under the domination of the charismatic and berserk Rodney Little… But the resolution of the crime matters very little, much less than the exposure of the deadly economics of the drug traffic in inner cities (years before Freakonomics!), of the constant fight of single mothers to bring food and structure to their dysfunctional families, to the widespread recourse to moonlighting, and above all to the almost physical impossibility to escape one’s environment (even for smart and decent kids like Victor and, paradoxically enough, the drug-dealing Strike) by lack of prospect and exposure to anything or anywhere else, as well as social pressure, early pregnancies and gang-related micro-partitioning of cities.

When I mentioned Clockers to a close friend, he told me that he also liked it very much but that the characters were not quite “real”. I somewhat agree in that, while the economics, the sociology and the practice of drug-dealing sound very accurately reproduced (for all I know!), the characters are more caricaturesque or picturesque than natural. The stomach disease of Strike sounds too much like an allegory of both his schizophrenic split between running the drug trade and looking for a definitive quit, while the sacrifice of his brother makes little sense, except as a form either of suicide or of escape from an environment he can no longer stand. What is most surprising is that Richard Price (just like Michael Crichton) is a practised screenwriter (who collaborated to Spike Lee’s 1995 Clockers). So he knows how to run an efficient story with convincing characters and plot(s). Hence my little theory of a picaresque novel…
Good book, but nearly every page of the version (as of September 2016) is filled with typos. Examples "So you takir? your medicine", "...looking at me you know like trvine to decide if it was worth it and him Rut then hist walk back in leaves the dog right where it's shot cold-blooded bastard...", etc.
I am a HUGE fan of Richard Price and this novel. But it looks like the edition was created off of a crooked PDF. It's a disgrace to Price's writing.

may want to include a way for readers to submit corrections to books, let readers correct your careless mistakes.

If you're reading this novel for the first time, I suggest you buy a hard copy, trying to read Price's dialogue when it's full of typos will be very difficult.
Great book, terrible edition. It was like they just put the book on a scanner, poured whisky all over it and let 'er rip. Throughout the book, for example, "clocker" is almost always written as "docker," apostrophes and commas cover each other's shifts, and sometimes I really don't know if an unfamiliar word is some street talk or my slurring away at the story.

Again, a great book! I just wish I hadn't wasted my money on the edition. And I'm beginning to wonder if I feel the same way about the as a whole if this is the quality of editing that goes into these books.