Gemini is a collection of miscellaneous essays—roughly half of them autobiographical; the rest, critical and political…. Miss Giovanni allows her sense of commitment to lead her into making some rather foolish assertions. Thus, in one anthropologically dubious chapter, called "The Weather as Cultural Determiner," she asserts that Africa's balmy climate established in the genes of all blacks a harmony with nature that whites, originating in the cold North, can never hope to enjoy. Moreover, with their racial memories of a warm past and of eons spent in living unencumbered by heavy clothes, blacks are naturally more open, more joyous, more rhythmical beings than are the pinched, dour, stiff whites. There are no good white men. The whites have never produced an original genius. Shakespeare and Cervantes? Honkies! The best of white culture was stolen from the blacks.

The trouble is not merely that this sounds very much...