| Product Summary | | Format: CD | | ISBN: 9781602833869 | | Publisher: BBC Audiobooks | | Publish Date: 2/1/2008 | | Buy.com Sku: 206844976 | | Item#: | | Dimensions (in Inches) 5.75H x 5L x 1T | | Edition Number: 30 |
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| | | This monumental Pulitzer Prize-winning saga and iconic bestseller is available for the first time on audio. Roots begins with a birth in an African village in 1750, and ends two centuries later at a funeral in Arkansas. In that time span, an unforgettable cast of men, women, and children come to life, many of them based on the people from Alex Haley's own family tree.
Annotation:
An historical narrative of slavery in the American South. Based upon actual researches conducted over a period of years, Haley reconstructs the events that led to the enslavement of Kunte Kinte, the "African" identified in Haley's family lore as their founding father, and his settlement on American shores. Kinte, in his own history, becomes an allegory of the history of the millions of Africans brought forcibly to America, and of the people they became in the intervening years.
| PraiseNew York Times Book Review
"'As I look at it now,' says Alex Haley, 'it seems there was a meant-to-be quality about 'Roots'. I first heard the story told by my grandmother as a child, that was the real beginning....Whenever we children came around, she would repeat the story of the man she called 'the African,' how he was captured and what happened to him in America. After a while we started acting out the incidents, play-acting, recreating everything she told us, and it became an indelible memory for me....Although it's advertised as nonfiction, perhaps we should call it 'faction.' Every statement in 'Roots' is accurate in terms of authenticity....The beginning is a re-creation, using novelistic techniques, but as it moves forward more is known and it is more factually based.'" - Alex Haley 09/26/1976Nation
"Like 'Roots,' Kunte Kinte will become one of the great creations of American literature, a character endowed, through Haley's moving prose, with the thoughts, actions and strength of many millions of American slaves. It is no understatement to call him an Everyman but one unlike any allegorical figure in our written culture....Haley has uncovered beneath the chronicles of white America the raging heart and tenacious history of a people in captivity." - Jason Berry 10/02/1976 Newsweek
"The passion of Haley's narrative, the sweep of its concept and its wealth of largely neglected material elevate 'Roots' to an event of social importance...a book that is bold in concept and ardent in execution, one that will reach millions of people and alter the way we see ourselves." - P. D. Zimmerman 09/27/1976 Saturday Review
"The saga of Kunte Kinte, from a small boy in his African village to the midyears of his life, is absolutely first-rate and fascinating. Thereafter the story, with a few notable exceptions, seems overly familiar and without suspense....'Roots,' unhappily, is not the masterwork one had hoped for, yet the flaws pale when compared with the enormity of Haley's task." - L. L. King 09/18/1976 |
| Author Bio| Alex Haley | | Haley joined the Coast Guard when he was 18, to see the world; on shipboard, he began to write, and managed to publish some work in romance and adventure magazines. When he retired from the Coast Guard in 1959, he began conducting interviews for "Playboy"; among his subjects was Malcolm X, who a few years later asked Haley to help him produce "The Autobiography of Malcolm X". The book was published shortly before Malcolm's assassination in 1965. At the same time, Haley began writing his own book, the monumental "Roots", based on family stories. "Roots" was enormously popular and influential (as was the TV version), and helped raised the consciousness of white Americans about the effects of slavery, oppression, and the strong bonds of family in black America. |
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