The African

I was lead to this book after reading Alex Haley's Roots. Roots was captivating to me (see review), and so I did some additional research on it and discovered there were alligations that Haley plagiarized from Harold Courlander's "The African", published nine years before Roots (It seems the passage......more

From the very first words I knew that Alex plagiarized but here’s the thing, Harold actually STUDIED African& Haitian/Caribbean History... he took many trips and actually did the work!! I loved this book from beginning to end and really did not want it to end. In some ways, I feel as if HC embodied......more

Courlander was an ethnomusicologist who traded reel-to-reel tapes with people from all over the world. He adapted to what he'd learned from from histories on either side of the Middle Passage and turned it into a novel written in the style that one lives one's life: not quite knowing what will happe......more

Well Worth Reading Whether you've read Roots or not, The African was a beautiful novel. I discovered it when I decided to read Roots for my Journey Around the World in 80 Books for 2019. I read The African so I could compare the two works. The two books have very little comparisons between them. I wa......more

another really good book from my "sociology of the inner city child" class. the author of this book sued alex haley (the author of roots) for stealing his idea... and won! there are definitely some eerily similar experiences in both books.......more