Audi­ences were first intro­duced to attor­ney and author Joshua Safran in the crit­i­cal­ly acclaimed 2011 doc­u­men­tary Crime After Crime (Sun­dance, Oprah Win­frey Net­work) which chron­i­cled his sev­en-year strug­gle to free a bat­tered woman from prison and pro­filed his faith as an Ortho­dox Jew. Now, in Free Spir­it: Grow­ing Up On the Road and Off the Grid Safran has writ­ten a vis­cer­al­ly pow­er­ful and elo­quent mem­oir that reveals the dark­er side of The Age of Aquar­ius. Safran recounts hitch­hik­ing across the Amer­i­can West with his wic­can, rev­o­lu­tion­ary, cryp­to-Jew­ish moth­er and stand­ing up to his vio­lent, alco­holic, gueril­la-fight­er step­fa­ther. His sto­ry reveals how he over­came adver­si­ty, recon­nect­ed to his Jew­ish her­itage and the ancient spir­i­tu­al­i­ty of the Land of Israel, and became the lawyer we meet in Crime After Crime. Safran’s riv­et­ing, lit­er­ary sto­ry has earned him praise as one of the next gen­er­a­tion’s most inspired Jew­ish spir­i­tu­al lead­ers. Pub­lish­ers Week­ly called his book ​“rem­i­nis­cent of David Sedaris’s and Augusten Burroughs’s best work: intro­spec­tive, hilar­i­ous, and heartbreaking.”