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ROOTS by AtEX HALEY 587 pages. Doubleday...
...Sept. 29,1967, Alex Haley quietly celebrated a private bicentennial He stood on a wharf at Annapolis Md exactly 200 years to the day after his great-great-great-great grandfather stumbled off the deck of the slave ship Lord Ligonier at the same spot. His ancestor was Kunta Kinte, one of 98 "Negroes" who managed to survive the three-month trip from West Africa. The original consignment, "packed like spoons in a drawer " included 140 Africans. The one-third loss, Haley notes drily, was about average for an 18th century slave voyage...
...Series. Haley, a 55-year-old retired Coast Guardsman who is best known as the co-author of The Autobiography of Malcolm X, may be the only black American to possess such precise details about his ancestry. Roots: The Saga of an American Family is Haley's memorial to that past. After twelve years of research and writing, delays and financial crises, the book is finally out. Yet it moves like a deep, slow-moving river that has always been there. For those who are unable or unwilling to read its 587 pages, Roots has been made a twelve...
Roots most closely resembles a historical novel, a form that Haley does not seem to have studied too carefully. His narrative is a blend of dramatic and melodramatic fiction and fact that wells from a profound need to nourish himself with a comprehensible past. Haley recreates the Old South of mansions and slave shacks, fully aware that chains and blood ties were at times indistinguishable. The book dramatically details slave family life-birth, courtship, marriage ("jumping the broom"), death and the ever present fear of being sold off and having to leave your...
...tell him Eth-nic-ity, but that's not the answer.) This was Mel Brooks' first feature and it reaches heights Catskillian. Surely if one had the chance to show a class of Martians any ten American comedies, this would be included in the green syllabus because, as Alex Haley might point out, of its roots. Like tumescent udders (ech!) Mel Brooks's toors hang, full of borscht and seltzer while the crazed milkmaids Mostel, Wilder, Dick Shawn and Kenneth Mars squeeze and squeeze and squeeze. So much of the American comic strain flows through this film that it makes...