Description

By (author) Alex Haley; By (author) Haley Alex

Short /annotation

Now a major BBC drama starring Forest Whitaker, Jonathan Rhys Meyers and Laurence Fishburne

Tracing his ancestry through six generations – slaves and freedmen, farmers and blacksmiths, lawyers and architects – back to Africa, Alex Haley discovered a sixteen-year-old youth, Kunta Kinte.

Now a major BBC drama starring Forest Whitaker, Jonathan Rhys Meyers and Laurence Fishburne

Tracing his ancestry through six generations – slaves and freedmen, farmers and blacksmiths, lawyers and architects – back to Africa, Alex Haley discovered a sixteen-year-old youth, Kunta Kinte. It was this young man, who had been torn from his homeland and in torment and anguish brought to the slave markets of the New World, who held the key to Haley”s deep and distant past.

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award

Review quote
Haley succeeds beautifully where many have failed… The book is an act of love, and it is this which makes it haunting

Review quote
A gripping mixture of urban confessional and political manifesto, it not only inspired a generation of black activists, but drove home the bitter realities of racism to a mainstream white liberal audience

Review quote
Groundbreaking

Review quote
A Pulitzer Prize-winning story about the family ancestry of author Alex Haley… [and] a symbolic chronicle of the odyssey of African Americans from the continent of Africa to a land not of their choosing

Biographical note

Alex Haley taught himself to write during a twenty-year stint in the US Coast Guard. He became its first Chief Journalist, a position he held until he retired in 1959 to become a magazine writer and interviewer. His first book was The Autobiography of Malcolm X, after which he spent twelve years researching and writing Roots, which won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award.

Alex Haley died in Seattle, Washington in 1992.

Promotional headline
The radical, bestselling and Pulitzer Prize-winning account of Alex Haley”s own twelve-year search for his family”s origins – a powerful memoir, a history of slavery and a landmark in African-American literature.