Soul on Ice is divided into four parts that describe the author’s journey from a “supermasculine” but disadvantaged young man into a radical Black liberationist. However, Cleaver’s surprising late-in-life turn from the radical left towards conservative politics casts him and his memoir in a different light. After his release from prison, Cleaver became a prominent member of the Black Panthers, advocating urban guerilla warfare against a corrupt police force. His essays were instrumental in forming the philosophies and ideas behind the black power movement. The essays were first published in Ramparts magazine in 1965, and then collected in book form after Cleaver’s release in 1968. If Cleaver keeps his style under control, his emotional honesty out in front, his intellect on the make, he may end up truly first-rate.Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul on Ice is a memoir and collection of essays written while the author served time in Folsom Prison.

The book deals with the important things better than 99.4% of the current discussions of race relations. All this adds up to some invidious comparisons: memoirs to rival those of Piri Thomas or Claude Brown without their latent self-congratulation Mailer's iconoclasm without his neo-euphuism a SNCC indignation talking up, not down, Baldwin's capacity to transcribe experience into social terms (Cleaver criticizes him, but he seems a non-activist spokesman of this decad as as Baldwin was of the last). His letters from prison to his lawyer, Beverly Axelrod, will embarrass even sympathetic readers, however they deal at violently introspective length with black men's craving for white women.

His mistakes are fascinating, too, as when he overrates the alienation of young whites. He discusses pertinent phenomena from New Left and New Right (both ''the spawn of the Negro revolution'') to Cassius Clay (in the context of Negro atheletes' prior roles). His general credo: ''The racial problem can no longer be solved in isolation,'' for even if ''Whitey'' wanted to eradicate all evil overnight, the U.S. The essays offer a constellation of discrete insights into black militancy and white society. Cleaver writes well, with remarkable assurance and without most of the mannerisms of a young self-taught writer-much less a young Negro writer, which he is-an ex-Muslim who served time for marijuana and rape, putting out most of Soul on Ice in jail.

Soul on ice author cleaver