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livesinthetub 's review for:
Roots: The Saga of an American Family
by Alex Haley
book #24 of 2021: Roots: the Saga of an American Family by Alex Haley (pub. 1976) wow! this book’s amazingly descriptive storytelling, wonderfully rounded and human characters, stunning survival and dignity people exhibited amidst unfathomably atrocious treatment, as well as unbelievable capacity to give back to help those around them will all suck you in utterly and you won’t be able to stop until you’ve finished it. clearly the precedent for Colson Whitehead’s Underground Railroad and Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing, this book traces a family’s lineage from Africa through slavery in the US to what we now call freedom. I have books of his interviews, as well as the autobiography he helped Malcolm X write - and I plan to read them all: end of the world permitting, but this is his family’s story that he traced back, not just for himself, but to give every black person in the US, whose family endured slavery, a sense of their heritage in Africa and through early American history. he went through so much to research this book, and while I know people have taken some issue with some of the details, the work he created is astounding. it was a 30-hour listen and I’m so grateful to Mr. Haley to have had the chance. I thought for sure that Homegoing was the best fiction I’d read this year, but I may have to create another best of category: semi-fictional family history, just for this year.