"Based on the PBS television series Faces of America hosted by
Henry Louis Gates, Jr."
As a nation of immigrants, the American experience is vibrantly
defined by the diverse racial, ethnic, cultural, and religious
heritage of its people. Americans carve out their personal
histories by tracing genealogies, combing through family archives,
and mining the stories and family trees of their elders. But how
far back into your past can you actually go? If you could look even
four hundred years into your genetic history, what would that
really look like?
Since 2006, scholar and cultural critic Henry Louis Gates, Jr.,
has been helping African Americans find long-buried details of
their ancestries by analyzing their DNA and then marrying that
information to a wealth of historical data. Global in scope, Faces
of America will look outside the Black experience to explore the
roots and identities of twelve of America's most recognizable and
extraordinary citizens, who are of Asian, Hispanic, Irish, Italian,
Jewish, Syrian, West Indian, and Native American ancestry:
Inaugural poet Elizabeth Alexander, chef Mario Batali, comedian and
television personality Stephen Colbert, writer Louise Erdrich,
writer Malcolm Gladwell, actress Eva Longoria, cellist Yo Yo Ma,
writer and director Mike Nichols, former monarch of Jordan Queen
Noor, surgeon and author Dr. Mehmet Oz, actress Meryl Streep, and
Olympic gold medalist and figure skater Kristi Yamaguchi.
Each of the celebrity subjects in Faces of America underwent
dense genotyping to trace their father's line, mother's line, and
their percentages of European, Asian, Native American, and African
ancestry. Gates and his father, Henry Louis Gates, Sr., also took
part, making medical history in the process as they both had their
entire genomes--six billion base pairs--sequenced and analyzed by
geneticists at the Broad Institute and the Harvard Medical
School.
Faces of America unfolds as a rollicking journey into the
ancestral past. Readers will share in the surprise, delight, shock
and profound education of the subjects themselves as their rich
family stories, traced back to their arrival on America--s shores,
and beyond, deep into the history of their countries of origin, are
revealed. America, as Gates shows us, is a nation of many
historical threads, interwoven and united in the present moment.
Where we come from informs what we are and even who we are
today.
General
Is the information for this product incomplete, wrong or inappropriate?
Let us know about it.
Does this product have an incorrect or missing image?
Send us a new image.
Is this product missing categories?
Add more categories.
Review This Product
No reviews yet - be the first to create one!