Roots: The Saga of an American Family

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	• Roots: The Saga of an American Family Alex Haley Vanguard Press, 2007 - 899 pages average customer review:based on 169 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Roots: The Saga of an American Family

Book is in perfect condition as described by seller and arrived in the time stated. I recommend ordering from this seller.

Roots

Love reading this book after so many years! It reminds me that all men deserve dignity and repect. Also, freedom is not free. We all in one way or another has paid a price for freedom!

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A beloved book marred by flaws

I love Roots and think the whole world should read it. It's an important and vital book about American history, family history, and triumph over hardship. I loved Roots the first time I read it twenty years ago, and I love it still, having just finished it yesterday, BUT...

1) If only Alex Haley hadn't plagiarized whole sections of the book (see Wikipedia's article on the author Harold Courlander)

2) If only Haley really HAD been related to Kunta Kinte (genealogists state he consciously perpetrated a hoax)

3) If only Juffure really WAS Haley's ancestral village (evidence suggests that the griot from modern Juffure with "memories" of Kunta Kinte's disappearance in 1767 was coached about what to "remember")

I found these fabrications depressing. And what's so sad is that I believe Haley had no need to lie and cheat, because he's really a top-notch storyteller.

This aside, though, I have a few other critical comments.

1) The book begins a slow descent into petering out after Kunta Kinte exits. The characters become increasingly wooden and one-dimensional. Kunta is great, Kizzy is good, Chicken George is fair, and everyone and almost everything after that is forgettable.

2) The book lauds having tons of children, mindlessly, and fails to criticize parents who have children and cannot provide for them. Haley makes it seem that having children and passing on the family name, no matter what horror the child risks getting subjected to, is the noblest of goals. I disagree! It sounds crass to say that slaves shouldn't have had children, but I hold all parents, slaves or not (rape victims being an exception), responsible when they knowingly bring children into a world of hell. (And Chicken George - a neglectful parent, to say the least - bringing 8 children into slavery? Nothing admirable there!)

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Reviw for the Kindle editon

I read this book on Kindle a couple of months ago. I remember watching the mini series as a kid but had never read the book. I'm not going to go into the literary aspects because that has been covered, in it's good and bad points already. I will say I'm glad I've read it. I won't consider it a completely accurate history lesson, but it does make a person think past normal boundaries. This book is formatted well for Kindle, it had no formatting issues. The fact I read it on Kindle was "handy" because I could look up tribal phrases in the dictionary, or wiki with little effort and go straight back to reading.

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A must read

anybody interested in American history or family this is the book to read. Hailey is a must read for eveybody.

reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10

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.

Presented abridged on 12 CDs.

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