Roots: The Saga of an American Family Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Alan Crawford

Critical Essay by Alan Crawford

SOURCE: Crawford, Alan. “All in the Family.” National Review 29, no. 8 (4 March 1977): 278-79.

In the following essay, Crawford reviews Roots.

“The end of the American artist's pilgrimage to Europe is the discovery of America,” Leslie Fiedler writes. So, too, the American artist's pilgrimage (if he is black) to Africa: after 12 years of research and half a million miles of travel, Alex Haley has discovered an America that is feasting on his book [Roots] and has devoured a television adaptation as well. Haley thus finds himself an Instant Celebrity, that most American form of notoriety and one which, I suspect, leaves him feeling most ambivalent. For the mission—there is no other word—he undertook over a decade ago was an intensely personal one, so personal in fact that his closeness to the subject accounts for the strength of Roots—a work of decidedly mixed parts—as well as for its...
(read more)