While eating dinner with Herbert Woodward Martin, the author was surprised to see the renowned poet squirreling away packets of restaurant sugar. Certainly the bard of Dayton made enough money to buy his own sweetener! In the ensuing... Read More

When Assyrian strongman Sennacherib led his forces on an invasion of Judah in the year 701, a flank attack by Africans from Egypt disrupted his assault. As reported in the books Isaiah and Kings in the Bible, the attack caused concern... Read More

If beauty is in the eye of the beholder, then Americans’ standards of what’s desirable are only skin deep. That merging of clichés summarizes this collection of scholarly essays on skin color and its effect on societal norms in the... Read More

Elston Howard had much better timing on the baseball diamond than off it. The first black New York Yankee—a solid catcher with a lifetime fielding average of .993 who was voted the American League’s Most Valuable Player in... Read More

Fanon probably doesn’t belong in the same pantheon as Christ or Gandhi, as Ehlen alludes to in the opening chapter of his book. The man and his ideas, however, certainly deserve more consideration than they are accorded today. Fanon, a... Read More

Holt takes on a huge task in a slim volume, attempting to place the conundrum of race in the context of a new century. Starting with the natural jumping-off point of W. E. B. DuBois’ prediction (1903) that the problem of the twentieth... Read More

A soul is as resilient and as sure to return as a soccer ball tossed back into the field of play: this sublime metaphor for a West African concept of the soul’s endurance livens up the collection of essays on African cosmology.... Read More