Book Reviews

Spring 2005:
Dancing on the Rings of Saturn by Richard Ball

Dancing on the Rings of Saturn tells the story of Frankie, D.D. Weed, Bobo, and King as they come of age in central Florida during the tumultuous 1960s. The novel delves into the personal history of the author and interweaves experiences and memories that form an intricate web of discovery and insight into what it was like to be Black in America during the Civil Rights Movement.

Richard D. Ball, Ph.D. is a professor in the Natural Health Sciences Division at Barry University in Miami, Florida. Dancing on the Rings of Saturn is Dr. Richard Ball’s first novel.

Fall 2004:
The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness by Paul Gilroy

The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness is the winner of the 1994 American Book Award of the Before Columbus Foundation. This important book is one of the seminal texts in the Africana Studies because of its ability to fully explore the historical influences, and continued connections between the “Black world” and the European history that so often subsumes African world experience. According to Gilroy, “The Black Atlantic developed from my uneven attempts to show…that the experiences of black people were part of the abstract modernity they found so puzzling and to produce as evidence some of the things that black intellectuals had said—sometimes as defenders of the West, sometimes as its sharpest critics—about their sense of embeddedness in the modern world” (Preface).

Paul Gilroy is a Sociology Professor and the author of There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack: The Cultural Politics of Race and Nation.