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tictactoney 's review for:
Roots: The Saga of an American Family
by Alex Haley
So I suppose I liked the book but that's mostly because I LOVE what it stands for. My grandpa is pretty into tracing back our family tree, but that's a sort of hobby that would be nigh impossible for the descendants of American slaves (meaning it's one of those luxuries I as a white person didn't realize I had, but I'm learning!! #BLM!!!). This book is ambitious and it's hopeful and probably provides some sort of legacy-based closure for many African Americans out there.
So of course I was deeply saddened when I found out that the veracity of this book has been so hotly questioned and contested. And then I read about the plagiarism allegations and the whole book lost its sparkle, it felt like a counterfeit. I'm still giving it an extra stars for what it aspires to, for being a surrogate family tree for all the uprooted out there, but the controversies made it hard for me to finish the book, and definitely hurts its purpose.
And to throw some feminism in here, I got a little peeved by how the Kunta Kinte-descended women's narratives were just vehicles to the next male. Kizzy was talked about only until she had Chicken George, then she disappeared into fieldwork and became as two dimensional as Sister Sarah and Uncle Pompey. Cynthia was talked about just to have Bertha to have Alex. And Bertha's brief section was mostly dominated by her father's point of view anyway (who isn't even descended from Kunta? He wedded into the bloodline we're following). The book even ends with Alex's father's funeral, when he was related to the Kinte clan on his maternal side.
Also, I have a few major questions:
1. How in the absolute heck did Kizzy (the elder Kizzy) only have one baby by Tom Lea?!
2. What happened to Ashford? He's just a general grouch for like 50 pages, and it's alluded to that he never marries, aaaaaand that's it.
3. For that matter, what happened to Ol' George Johnson? He ran into some alienation issues in Henning from being a "po' white cracker" but then...vanished. Did the Johnson family move out of Henning? Have any more kids?
4. What did Chicken George DO while he was gone from Alsace County?
So of course I was deeply saddened when I found out that the veracity of this book has been so hotly questioned and contested. And then I read about the plagiarism allegations and the whole book lost its sparkle, it felt like a counterfeit. I'm still giving it an extra stars for what it aspires to, for being a surrogate family tree for all the uprooted out there, but the controversies made it hard for me to finish the book, and definitely hurts its purpose.
And to throw some feminism in here, I got a little peeved by how the Kunta Kinte-descended women's narratives were just vehicles to the next male. Kizzy was talked about only until she had Chicken George, then she disappeared into fieldwork and became as two dimensional as Sister Sarah and Uncle Pompey. Cynthia was talked about just to have Bertha to have Alex. And Bertha's brief section was mostly dominated by her father's point of view anyway (who isn't even descended from Kunta? He wedded into the bloodline we're following). The book even ends with Alex's father's funeral, when he was related to the Kinte clan on his maternal side.
Also, I have a few major questions:
1. How in the absolute heck did Kizzy (the elder Kizzy) only have one baby by Tom Lea?!
2. What happened to Ashford? He's just a general grouch for like 50 pages, and it's alluded to that he never marries, aaaaaand that's it.
3. For that matter, what happened to Ol' George Johnson? He ran into some alienation issues in Henning from being a "po' white cracker" but then...vanished. Did the Johnson family move out of Henning? Have any more kids?
4. What did Chicken George DO while he was gone from Alsace County?