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jason_as 's review for:
Roots: The Saga of an American Family
by Alex Haley
I skipped through boring parts a lot, which was a lot of this. I know this is like the most epic TV ever (6 of the T40 programs; the only other thing w/more than 2 slots is the Super Bowl) but…the characters are not complex, the acting often bugs or bores (though I can see why Uggams was the only Globe nominee; she cries well and works better when she’s not playing a 30ish teenager), they could have taken a lot of stuff out esp since Part 8 is almost entirely not even in the book and the most interesting part i.e. Kunta’s childhood was drastically reduced though I wonder if they would have gotten a kid even worse than Burton if the mini included his younger years more. The book is fairly lively in the African section, but maybe I’ve read too many narratives of slavery in the US and the early part was just new and fresh to me while its substance might be as stale as the other material. Haley’s not a bad writer, exactly, though his writing style isn’t strong enough to overcome his faults; he just has unimportant events – or even important ones – take up too many pages and it feels like it takes forever before something happens again. He’s also better at description than dialogue, in such a way that the characters whose points of view are not heard from feel like entirely artificial constructs.