Roots by Alex Haley
Finally finished listening to 30 hours of Roots on Audible, wonderfully read by Avery Brooks. Brooks reads out the story masterfully, adding song and rhythm to words, making the characters come alive in the listener's imagination.
Roots tells the tumultuous story of an African-American family encompassing seven generations, starting from the proud African who was kidnapped near his village in Gambia, following the story of his descendants enduring five generations of slavery and then life after emancipation. In each enslaved generation, the desire for freedom was always present in the undertone, with hope rising and ebbing with the reality of their circumstance.
There were many emotional moments listening to the recording, such as when the fiddler finally saves up enough money to buy his freedom, only to discover that prices have gone up and he would never live long enough to buy his freedom. Or the agony of a slave mother enduring the second time that her baby girl would be sold away from her.
The story informs and educates about the damage done to the human spirit by the engine of slavery and challenges ideas about equality, freedom and justice. Standing on the other side, we could be sympathetic but it's not enough to sit in silence and lament the grievances of society. To sum it up, "In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends." - Martin Luther King Jr.
Roots tells the tumultuous story of an African-American family encompassing seven generations, starting from the proud African who was kidnapped near his village in Gambia, following the story of his descendants enduring five generations of slavery and then life after emancipation. In each enslaved generation, the desire for freedom was always present in the undertone, with hope rising and ebbing with the reality of their circumstance.
There were many emotional moments listening to the recording, such as when the fiddler finally saves up enough money to buy his freedom, only to discover that prices have gone up and he would never live long enough to buy his freedom. Or the agony of a slave mother enduring the second time that her baby girl would be sold away from her.
The story informs and educates about the damage done to the human spirit by the engine of slavery and challenges ideas about equality, freedom and justice. Standing on the other side, we could be sympathetic but it's not enough to sit in silence and lament the grievances of society. To sum it up, "In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends." - Martin Luther King Jr.
Comments
Post a Comment