Most African Americans, in tracing their family’s past, encounter a series of daunting obstacles. Slavery was a brutally efficient nullifier of identity, willfully denying black men and women even their names. Here, scholar Henry Louis Gates, Jr., backed by an elite team of geneticists and researchers, takes nineteen extraordinary African Americans on a once unimaginable journey, tracing family sagas through U.S. history and back to Africa.

Those whose recovered pasts collectively form an African American “people’s history” of the United States include celebrities such as Oprah Winfrey, Whoopi Goldberg, Chris Rock, Don Cheadle, Chris Tucker, Morgan Freeman, Tina Turner, and Quincy Jones; writers such as Maya Angelou and Bliss Broyard; leading thinkers such as Harvard divinity professor Peter Gomes, the Reverend T. D. Jakes, neurosurgeon Ben Carson, sociologist Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot; and famous achievers such as Mae Jemison, Tom Joyner, Jackie Joyner-Kersee, and Linda Johnson Rice.

More than a work of history, In Search of Our Roots is a book of revelatory importance that, for the first time, brings to light the lives of ordinary men and women who, by courageous example, blazed a path for their famous descendants.


From the Compact Disc edition.

Narrator Dominic Hoffman doubles the enjoyment one might feel from the printed version of this book. His articulate, soft voice with sibilant s's could credibly be the author telling of his extensive research into the genealogies of the 19 African-Americans he chose as subjects. Most are celebrities--Maya Angelou, Morgan Freeman, Oprah Winfrey--but the research methods, such as DNA analysis, used to uncover the depersonalization of slavery could apply to every person of African descent in America. Hoffman employs both subtle and vivid characterizations for the many individuals whose words he expresses. He can pronounce the names of the ancient and modern regions of Africa like a native speaker. Hoffman's style seems so natural that listeners may never be aware of his polished technique. J.A.H. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award (c) AudioFile 2009, Portland, Maine

 

In Search of Our Roots by Henry Louis Gates
Continue Browsing		View Wish List