This book is very difficult for me to review. The beginning is horrible and mind-numbingly boring. Some baby is born in Africa, and without providing a reason for us to care, Haley provides every last little detail of some baby's life. I had to skip about a hundred pages of this part, in hopes of something actually happening once the boring baby gets captured. After he does, the book moves from unreadably dull to tolerable only in very small pieces read with a determination to get through this book.
And then the miracle happens. At about the halfway point of this way too long book, it gets better. The story becomes readable and interesting, the characters cease to be caricatures of caricatures, and it is possible to read the book for more than five minutes at a time. It drags in places, but overall, the back half of Roots is very good. By the end of the book, when Haley begins to write a very personal essay about his journey of discovery and finding out about his ancestry, it is riveting and the writing is amazing. The moment where he in Africa found out that they have records of his long-deceased ancestor that got snatched out of the woods is unforgettable. I wish Haley would have begun his book with his ending and then gone on to tell a very edited version of his story. I also would have liked for him to add some balance to his story. I wanted less Africa and more of Haley's more recent ancestors. By the time he gets to his 'that baby was me' moment, I had ceased caring again, because he was moving too quickly through his genealogy.
Overall though, I love this premise of his, following a family through its entrance into America and into prosperity. I found myself reaching for another volume that Haley wrote tracing another line of his ancestry before I remembered that he can't write very well.