Television: View from the Whirlpool

Talking about where he has been in the past two frantic years, Alex Haley sounds like a gazetteer. Osaka, Paris, Tehran, Tel Aviv. They seem as familiar to him as stations on a commuter run in Connecticut. Then, listening to him self, he stops and smiles apologetically. "And to think that when I was growing up in Henning, Tennessee, it used to be a big deal to get a lift on a feed truck to Memphis!" The phenomenal success of Roots has not so much changed Haley's life as it has obliterated it, giving him a new and often uncomfortable...

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