This collection of short family histories of prominent African Americans is based on the two African American Lives series written and produced by the author for public television. It seemed to me that some of the biographical/genealogical sketches were transcripts of segments I had seen on one of the TV series. If my memory is correct, stories about the ancestry of several prominent individuals are interwoven in a topical theme in the television series. In contrast, the book presents each celebrity's family history in a single chapter, so readers will get a different view of the information than will viewers of the TV series. The concluding chapter, “How to trace your own roots”, provides useful advice for beginning genealogists of any ethnicity, as well as citations for key genealogical reference sources. The book's biggest weakness is its lack of footnotes/end notes to document its claims. ( )

I might have rated this book a little higher had I not already seen the PBS programs on which it was based -- it's quite good, it was just that a lot of the information wasn't new to me. Gates, with the aid of genealogists and DNA testing, explored the family histories of such well-known African-Americans as Oprah Winfrey, Maya Angelou, Chris Rock, and Don Cheadle, among others. In almost every case, he hit the well-known "brick wall" sometime before 1870, the first census taken after Emancipation. Before that, it's very difficult to be sure about slave identities. Many of the people Gates worked with had some impressive stories in their family trees -- stories they had never heard (for example, an ancestor of comedian Chris Rock was a state legislator in South Carolina during Reconstruction). After exhausting the genealogical possibilities of the documentary record, each of the subjects had DNA testing, revealing the percentage of their DNA that came from African, European, Asian and Native American ancestors, and suggesting the parts of Africa from which the African ancestors came. The television programs actually did a better job of explaining the possibilities and limits of DNA testing than the book.

Reading this book made me feel very fortunate that, as a genealogist, my one African-American ancestor had a first and last name as early as 1785, because he was free and lived in the District of Maine. The book would be interesting even to people with no African-American roots because of its insights into black culture and U.S. history, its description of genealogical method, and the interesting people who were interviewed. ( )