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In Search of Our Roots

How 19 Extraordinary African Americans Reclaimed Their Past

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About this listen

 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.©2008 Henry Louis Gates; (P)2008 Books on Tape Americas Black & African American Social Sciences United States Celebrity Social justice Africa
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I think the writer of this book assumes that only African Americans will listen to this. This is a shame, as it is an interesting listen no matter your ethnicity.

Interesting and in depth and very American

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