List $59.95

Written by Alex Haley - Audio book performed by Avery Brooks - Unabridged Fiction - 24 COMPACT DISCS - 30 hours

Publisher, BBC Audiobooks America (June 2007)

Listen to an MP3 audio clip.

A Publisher's Weekly 'Listen Up Award 2007' Recipient - "One of the six best audios of 2007"

The Epic Saga of an American Family.

"…actor Avery Brooks has the monumental task of narrating the entire project. His powerful baritone voice is-as necessary-forceful, evocative, scholarly, and descriptive…he infuses his reading with inflections that define their personalities." —Library Journal

"Veteran actor, producer, educator and musician Avery Brooks, whose powerful baritone voice has been featured on audiobook versions of William H. Armstrong's Sounder and Terry McMillan's Disappearing Acts, narrates the nearly 31-hour project. This is an outstanding production." —Black Issues Book Review

"Being the consummate actor, Brooks has immersed himself into the role of narrator. In fact, it is difficult to describe what Avery Brooks does in this audiobook. He neither narrates nor performs, rather, he conjures. He brings the plethora of characters to life as memory, as history, as the pawns of Diaspora." —Audiofile Magazine

It begins with a birth in an African village in 1750, and ends two centuries later at a funeral in Arkansas. And in that time span, an unforgettable cast of men, women, and children come to life, many of them based on the people from Alex Haley's own family tree. When Alex was a boy growing up in Tennessee, his grandmother used to tell him stories about their family, stories that went way back to a man she called the African who was taken aboard a slave ship bound for Colonial America. As an adult, Alex spent twelve years searching for documentation that might authenticate what his grandmother had told him. In an astonishing feat of genealogical detective work, he discovered the name of the "African"--Kunta Kinte--as well as the exact location of the village in West Africa from where he was abducted in 1767. Roots is based on the facts of his ancestry, and the six generations of people--slaves and freedmen, farmers and lawyers, an architect, teacher--and one acclaimed author--descended from Kunta Kinte.

About the Author: Alex Haley (1921-1992) taught himself to write during a twenty year career in the U.S. Coast Guard. After retiring, he worked as a freelance magazine writer. His first book was The Autobiography of Malcolm X, on which he was collaborator and editor. Roots : The Saga of An American Family was his second book, for which he was awarded special recognition from the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award committees. He also wrote A Different Kind of Christmas, and Queen, a sequel to Roots.

About the Performer: Avery Brooks is an accomplished actor, director, musician and teacher. He is well-known to global audiences for his starring role as Captain Benjamin Sisko in the Star Trek series, Deep Space Nine. He also co-starred for three seasons as Hawk in Spenser: for Hire. His film credits include American History X, Fifteen Minutes, and The Big Hit, and his stage performances include the title roles in King Lear, Othello, and Phillip Hayes Dean's Paul Robeson. He is also a tenured professor of theater at Rutgers University.