The Extraordinary account of Alex Haley's own twelve-year search for his family's origins.

Tracing his ancestry through six generations - slaves and freedmen and blacksmiths, lawyers and architects back to Africa, he discovered a sixteen year-old youth, Kunta Kinte. It was this young man, who had been torn from his homeland and in torment and anguish brought to the slave markets of the New World who held the key to Alex Haley's deep and distant past.

'This book is an act of love and it is this which makes it haunting... Root is a study makes it haunting... Root is a study of continuites , of consequences, of how a people perpetuate themselves, how each generation helps to doom, or helps to liberate, the coming one'

James Baldwin, New York Times