Roots
1861
- blacks
- history
- african american families
- african americans
- afro-americans
- alex haley
- biography
- family
- haley family
- kinte family
The story
Roots is a novel written by Alex Haley and published in 1976. It portrays the story of Kunta Kinte, an 18th-century African, captured as an adolescent and sold into slavery in the United States, and follows his life and the lives of his alleged descendants in the U.S. down to Haley. The release of the novel, combined with its hugely popular television adaptation, Roots (1977), led to a cultural sensation in the United States. The novel spent 46 weeks on The New York Times Best Seller List, including 22 weeks in that list’s top spot. The last seven chapters of the novel were later adapted in the form of a second mini-series, Roots: The Next Generations, in 1979. The book sold over one million copies in the first year, and the miniseries was watched by an astonishing 130 million people. It also won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. Roots opened up the minds of Americans of all colors and faiths to one of the darkest and most painful parts of America’s past, and we continue to feel its reverberations today.
What it’s like
Warm village detail gives way to a long, grinding chronicle: the early chapters breathe with the sounds of a West African village, its cooking fires, drums, and rain on the river, before the prose turns hard and close in the holds of ships and on tobacco plantations in Virginia. The voice is plain, earnest, and sweeping, carrying the reader across generations in a steady, chronicle-like rhythm rather than in tight scenes. Its mood is weighty and elegiac, with dignity and family ties running under the grief. Intensity is high: whippings, brutal punishment, sexual violence, and the everyday cruelty of slavery appear directly and unflinchingly, though the violence is more recounted than lingered on. This is not a gentle read, and it is best approached in a settled frame of mind, over several sittings. It suits readers who want history made personal, deep family sagas, and stories of endurance across centuries, especially those prepared for emotionally heavy material.
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