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Title details for In Search of Our Roots by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. - Available

In Search of Our Roots

How 19 Extraordinary African Americans Reclaimed Their Past

by Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
Dominic Hoffman
Audiobook
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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.

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    January 27, 2009

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Listen audiobook

      • ISBN: 9781415959558
      • File size: 467708 KB
      • Duration: 16:14:23

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • AudioFile Magazine
      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
    • Publisher's Weekly

      Starred review from November 10, 2008
      In this companion book to a two-part PBS series, Gates (Colored People
      ) combines rigorous historical research with DNA analysis to recreate the family trees of African-American celebrities like Oprah Winfrey and Quincy Jones, as well as intellectuals, authors, comedians, musicians and athletes. Most of the subjects knew very little about ancestors as recent as grandparents, to say nothing of the information DNA results provided about their African and European ancestry. Gates connects gaps in ancestral knowledge to the fundamental evil of the American slave era, when slave owners and sellers purposely “robbed black human beings of... all aspects of civilization that make a human being 'human’: names, birth dates, family ties.” Though the book relies too heavily on the notion that knowing one’s ancestry leads to a better understanding of aspects of one’s own personality, Gates proves in case after case that the past brings itself to bear on the present. In Chris Rock’s case, had he known he had a 19th-century ancestor who had served as a South Carolina legislator, “it might have taken away the inevitability that I was going to be nothing.”

Formats

  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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