While I may know the direction my life is headed, I cannot fulfill that calling and vision, without building those roots down deep in the soil of intimacy, serving and community. Rooted helped me think about where I am on this journey in developing my roots so that I can continue to flourish and grow into the vision that God has given me. Lately, I've been listening to Simon and Garfunkel's The Sound of Silence, as performed by the group Disturbed. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u9Dg-... Haley earned a Pulitzer Prize special award in 1977 for Roots. [16] The television miniseries garnered many awards, including nine Emmys and a Peabody. Kunta Kinte – original protagonist: a young man of the Mandinka people, grows up in The Gambia in a small village called Juffure; he was raised as a Muslim before being captured and enslaved. Renamed Toby.

Lyanda Lynn Haupt is a naturalist, eco-philosopher, and speaker whose writing is at the forefront of the movement to connect people with nature in their everyday lives. Her newest book is Mozart's Starling: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3... Sarah Langford used her education to leave the farm for work and life in London. The same went for her husband. 83% of The population in the UK are urbanites now. Because of job situations Langford and her husband and small children returned to a family farm in what was to be a temporary situation. It soon became a passion and we get to see her awakening. I honestly can't believe how much I enjoyed this book. It's been sitting on my shelf for about half a year now and I've been wanting to read it as soon as I got it. I always just started another book though and always said "next time." My brother walks every weekend with his girlfriend, through every weather. They seek out the lonely places, the empty dirt roads, the parks only populated in sunshine.Rooted shows how agriculture has swung from one idea to another and how farmers are often battered and caught in a terrible bind. Langford interviews a number of contemporary farmers and tells their stories. I cringe at thought Roots: The Saga of an American Family is a novel written by Alex Haley and first published in 1976. Roots tells the story of Kunta Kinte—a young man taken from the Gambia when he was seventeen and sold as a slave—and seven generations of his descendants in the United States. The farming stories told in this book are informative, illuminating and at times deeply moving. They deal with issues such as isolation, economic hardship, generational tensions and pride in a job well done. There are moments of profound insight of which the following is just one example: I was only 8 when Roots came out and my family being of the average, racist variety in Florida at the time, we did not watch it on TV in 1977. In the meantime, I did a lot of work to unroot that racism I was brought up with and read widely: Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, Toni Cade Bambara, Zora Neale Hurston, Malcolm X, Ralph Ellison, etc. but until now, some 43 years later, I read Roots by Alex Haley. It was a moving experience, particularly the middle passage of Kunta Kinta from La Gambia to 'Napolis which I found particularly horrifying. In the coda, Chapter 120, Alex Haley says that he purposefully took a freighter along that same route, sleeping in the hold, nearly naked on a wooden plank. Hardcore. Now, there were several lawsuits, one of which Haley lost, for plagiarism of parts of Roots. This did bother me a little bit, but it didn't take away from the narrative.

About the time the King's soldiers came, the eldest of these four sons, Kunta, when he had about 16 rains, went away from his village to chop wood to make a drum ... and he was never seen again. [2]To be ripped apart from that after barely just being able to 'live' as they call it was heart-breaking. Just to be Kunta with his aspirations and dreams and then to be ripped from it just in a split second by someone with their own ideas and taken away from the only thing he knows. I can't imagine just being taken away from my famly and my COUNTRY to some strange place where they don't even speak a language I know. The story-telling was so descriptive, I cried, cringed and just felt a weight on my heart. The spirituality of oneness with all the earth is ancient, the constructiveness of all life part of religious experience found in many faiths, including Christianity. But modern humans live in houses and work in rooms and Western society buys and uses and discards; we have lost wonder and respect and stewardship for Earth. Haupt’s Crow Planet was the highlight of my 2019 animal-themed summer reading. I admired her determination to incorporate wildlife-watching into everyday life, and appreciated her words on the human connection to and responsibility towards the rest of nature. Rooted, one of my most anticipated books of this year, continues in that vein, yet surprised me with its mystical approach. No doubt some will be put off by the spiritual standpoint and dismiss the author as a barefoot, tree-hugging hippie. Well, sign me up to Haupt’s team, because nature needs all the help it can get, and we know that people won’t save what they don’t love. Start to think about trees and animals as brothers and sisters – or even as part of the self – and actions that passively doom them, not to mention wanton destruction of habitat, will hit closer to home. A beautiful, intelligent and unusual book … I’m hoping this book will become the anthem of our generation, encouraging all women to surrender to the earth’s intelligence and rise up, rooted, like trees.’ Kate Forsyth, author of ‘Bitter Greens’, T’he Wild Girl’, and ‘The Beast’s Garden’ The Waller family already owned the slave Toby in 1762, five years before the Lord Ligonier supposedly landed Kunta Kinte in Annapolis. Haley had only searched for references to Toby after 1767, succumbing to confirmation bias. Dr. Waller did not have a cook named Bell or his own plantation, as he was disabled and lived with his brother John. Toby also appears to have died before 1782, eight years before his daughter Kizzy was supposedly born. "Missy" Anne could not have been Kizzy's childhood playmate, as Ann Murray was a grown woman and already married in the relevant timeframe. In fact, there is no record of a Kizzy being owned by any of the Wallers. [25]