Word: haleys
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Haley's genealogical search took him back to West Africa. In Gambia he encountered an aged griot-a, tribal oral historian-who traced Haley's lineage back centuries before Kunta Kinte was snatched by slavers in 1767. The emotional impact of hearing his forebears named cannot be overestimated. Roots' opening section, a fictionalization of Kunta's birth, Moslem upbringing and manhood rites, have a vividness of detail that only the impassioned imagination can provide. Consider this for example...
...horrors of Kunta's ocean crossing are based on familiar scholarship But while returning from Africa on a modern freighter, Haley also forced himself to sleep half naked on a rough plank in the ship's airless hold. It was his way of trying to dissolve time and the cultural insulation that can prevent a writer from telling his story. What a story it turns out to be. The 17-year-old Kunta Kinte is sold to a Spotsylvania County, Va., planter for $850 and renamed Toby. But Kunta does not tame easily. Following his fourth escape attempt...
...next generation finds Kinte blood mingled with that of an ambitious black man named Will Palmer, who in 1894 becomes the prosperous owner of a Henning lumber company. Haley him self was born in Ithaca, N. Y., son of Bertha and Simon Haley, both college educated, teachers, and solid members of the black bourgeoisie...
...general, the more verified facts that Haley has to work with, the more wooden and cluttered his narrative. Yet the story of the Americanization of the Kinte clan strikes enough human chords to sustain the book's cumulative power...
...Haley's keen sense of separation and loss, and his ability to forge a return in language, override Roots' considerable structural and stylistic flaws. The book should find a permanent home in a century teeming with physical and spiritual exiles...