Samuel Freedman

“Human nature can be broken down into love, hate, ambition, and disappointment,” Samuel G. Freedman pointed out to a class of students that he visited at Baruch College. It can be assumed that someone with extensive experience and vast knowledge of human life and our behavior can make such an argument, and in Freedman’s case, such an assumption would be correct. He is a columnist for Saturday’s New York Times, for which he is constantly interviewing people. He is also a professor at the prestigious Columbia University. However, it is probably his latest book, Who She Was: My Search for My Mother’s Life, that gives Freedman the most credentials as a respectable writer.
As Freedman spoke of his late mother, the subject of his most recent book, it was clear that he took her close to heart. He said that although he has always despised the genre of memoire writing, this book was like an “act of penance” for him. He wanted to make up the debt of not being a great or caring son to his mother for the short nineteen years that he spent with her. In order to complete this rather personally fulfilling project, Freedman conducted four years of research. He interviewed his mother’s relatives, friends, neighbors, etc. “No rules apply for history or memoires,” he said, however, “One must not sanitize the topic.” After reading Who She Was, I realized that such advice must be heeded.
In addition to giving very helpful advice on writing a memoire/ biography, such as how to interview people you do not know, using photographs as tools, and retrieving old documents, Freedman gave some guidance for living a fulfilling life, something he claims he did not know when he was a young adult. He respects his mother because she had to put bread on the table when she was younger, something he was not responsible for. In other words, do not take things for granted. What he learned while writing Who She Was was that you should be careful about denying your kids what their hearts desire. Most importantly, the reason why he felt the need to write this book is to not spend your life hating a parent. It is not worth the stress and the very likely guilt that you will feel later on in life.
Clearly, Samuel G. Freedman is more than just a brilliant journalist, professor, and author. He is a man who has reached a point in his life in which he can reflect on his past mistakes, learn from them, and share them with others. “Not only famous lives are extraordinary or worth writing about. Any life can be dramatic,” he said. He can be a considered a philanthropist, one who through his writing and teaching wants to expose the good and bad of human kind, one person at a time.