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Roots: The Saga of an American Family: By Alex Haley New York, Doubleday, 1976. 688pp. $12.50

When historians of American popular culture someday review the decade of the '70s they certainly will have to pause at the year 1977 in order to explain the phenomenon of Roots, Alex Haley's "factional" account of his family history. Already Roots has been canonized into the catagory of special cultural event by the bestowal of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. In the first few weeks following publication, the book sold so well that bookstores were hard pressed to keep it stocked; and this, long before the paperback appeared. Sales were, of course, swollen by a vast number of television viewers who watched the home-screen adaptation of Roots which rated the largest TV audience of all time. Hundreds of post-mortem interviews attempted to answer the question, "Why the impact of Roots?" In the process, this made it an even bigger media event. Roots now comes in record albums, T-shirts, and jokes; and untold numbers of black Americans have grown tired of repeating their opinions of Roots mostly to white questioners. Alex Haley, collabcrrator with Malcolm X on the latter's classic Autobiography, received hard earned fame and fortune for the twelve years of labor which he put into researching and writing the story of Kunta Kinte and his descendents. The amazing success of Roots was detailed in lengthy cover stories in the news weeklies and the swell of acclaim was not even slowed by law suits over alleged plagiarism and a critical "expose" article in Britain calling into question the credibility of Haley's African informants. To be sure, the book and especially the television program have been criticized for historical inaccuracy, for stereotypical characterization, and for the distortion of commercialization. There is, it seems to me, truth to all these accusations, but somehow they seem mild and even unimportant in the face of the fact of Roots. The book's major flaw is a curious disjunction between fact and fiction. Haley does not always succeed in actualizing his theory of "faction" in the pages of his narrative. The problem is his awkward attempt to introduce bits and pieces of Afro-American history into the narrative by means of the slave grapevine. For example on two successive pages of Chapter 56, Haley has the slaves discussing Crispus Attuck's death at the Boston Massacre and George Leile's foundation of an African Baptist church in Savannah, Georgia. The question is not whether the slaves on a Virginia plantation could have known about these distant events as