Washington,' a biography that Jonathan Yardley praised for making him rethink his take on Washington.īorn in small-town Tennessee, Haley (1921-'92) joined the Coast Guard in 1939 as a 'mess boy' and later cook. Norrell is a professor of history at the University of Tennessee and author of 'Up from History: The Life of Booker T. He also grapples with questions about them, including the criticism that Haley softened Malcolm's point of view on black nationalism, and accusations that Haley plagiarized parts of 'Roots.'

Norrell describes the making, often messy, of these seminal books and their powerful impact on American culture. In 'Alex Haley: And the Books That Changed a Nation,' Robert J. Yet he wrote two of the 20th century's chief texts of African-American consciousness: 'The Autobiography of Malcolm X' and the saga 'Roots.' The latter was adapted for a blockbuster TV miniseries watched by a reported 130 million viewers. Perhaps as powerful as the imagery and the horrors of the slave trade is the fact that one man’s name and story was passed through his family for two-hundred years until his great-great-great-great-grandson, an author, visited Kunte Kinte’s home village in Juffure and was embraced as someone precious, thought lost.Alex Haley was a working freelance writer, not an ideologue. I suspect this is because Kunte Kinte and his family, and fellow Africans, would not have been taught anything beyond broken English – just enough to comprehend the demands of slave owners and overseers.Įmotionally rich and shocking, the writing is powerful, the history damning. However, the use of dialogue phonetics in this book is very effective. It slows the eye and therefore, messes with the pacing of the narrative. I know I’ve harped on in previous reviews about how deeply irked I am by phonetic dialogue.

The horror of this story is matched by the descriptive detail and the characterisations of real people who lived and suffered through an appalling period of modern history. His daughter, Kizzy, then passed this knowledge on to her son, George, who passed it to his children and so on and so forth each retelling adding a little of the life stories of subsequent generations until they reached the author. A semi-imagined, though thoroughly researched, family memoir, Roots tells the story of seven generations of a family: from the birth of Kunte Kinte in The Gambia in 1750, kidnapped, beaten, taken into slavery in America, after a voyage that killed many aboard the ship, sold and after many attempts at escape, mutilated so that he couldn’t run – and the generations that followed this taciturn man, who refused to take the name his owner tried to force on him, instead teaching his little daughter his history and some words from his homeland.

Roots book alex haley