In The Temple of My Familiar, Walker tries something almost destined to fail.

She challenges the West's Eurocentric vision of the world — its myths of human origins, its concepts of history, its ideas on political relationships, its attitudes toward the environment, its views on male/female relationships.

The male-dominated white culture has written the script and cast the players for thousands of years. In The Temple of My Familiar Walker recasts the roles and rewrites the script. Formerly marginalized people (principally African American females) take center stage — a much broader one than just Europe and North America — and play the heroic roles. Walker undoubtedly chose this approach because she knows, as does every chronicler of a people, that a people's concept of themselves and their prospects for the future are influenced by the accepted stories of their past. Those whose pages of history...