Roots

Discover Alex Haleys Pulitzer Prize-winning search for his family's origins: a powerful memoir, a history of slavery and a landmark in African-American literature. Tracing his ancestry through six generations of architects, lawyers, blacksmiths, farmers, freedmen and slaves, Alex Haleys research took him back to Africa and a sixteen-year-old youth named Kunta Kinte. Torn from his homeland and brought to the slave markets of the New World, re-imagining Kuntas journey would allow Haley to explore his familys deep and distant past. A gripping mixture of urban confessional and political manifesto, Roots not only inspired a generation of black activists, but drove home the bitter realities of racism to a mainstream white liberal audience Observer WITH A NEW INTRODUCTION BY DAVID OLUSOGA, AUTHOR OF BLACK AND BRITISH