[In the following review, Hornak compares Soul on Fire to Cleaver's previous writings, perceiving a distinct change in his literary style and tone.]

Eldridge Cleaver, once a writer with a mission, has turned missionary. Instead of warring against racist pigs he stands tall for Christ. From blazing invective his writing has changed to tiresome entreaty. The revolutionary has been born again.

In the sixties, when God was just a curse, Cleaver urged blacks to arm for battle. Whites heard too; with alarm they watched him stride with gun-toting compatriots into the California state house. These were the Black Panthers. Unless blacks got land, money, power, the Panthers would wage race war, Cleaver said. Jittery officials canceled a college course he was scheduled to teach; he renamed the state education commissioner Donald Duck and challenged the governor to a duel. The Peace and Freedom party nominated Cleaver for President in 1968, but his religion was violence; the Constitution would be laundered in blood.

Conversion, Cleaver writes in his latest book, Soul on Fire, came in southern France. It was 1975. In hiding seven years after fleeing a jail sentence in California, he was lonely and homesick. He contemplated suicide. Then he saw shadows on the moon. "I saw my former heroes paraded before my eyes," he writes. "Here were Fidel Castro, Mao Tse-tung, Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels…. Finally, at the end of the procession, in dazzling, shimmering light, the image of Jesus Christ appeared…. I just crumbled and started crying."

Cleaver began reading the Bible. His courage restored, he asked the State Department for passage home and got it. The Jesus freaks welcomed him as a brother. He and another reformed Christian, Charles Colson, went on national television to stump for the Lord. With video preacher Bob Schuller, Cleaver called on the powers of heaven. Meantime, in the creation of Soul on Fire, his writing was going to the devil.

Soul on Ice, Post-Prison Writings and Speeches, and Conversation, Cleaver's previous books (Lockwood simply transcribed the man's words to write the latter), were hailed in some quarters as masterpieces of sociology. They will continue to help sociologists get to the bottom of race hate in the United States. They are full of honest rage—sociological primary sources. But the books are only slightly analytical. Cleaver never wrote to analyze so much as to persuade. His books are means to an end. He was, in his prime, a master of invective.

In Soul on Ice, the calmest of his works, he says that he writes to "relieve a certain pressure." He is too modest. Works made chiefly to blow off steam are all huff, rambling and shallow, like anger itself. Cleaver's writings, though stormy, are well channeled. He knows what he wants to say. White America has a boot on his throat; the oppressor must be stopped. But he has hope of reconciliation.

Cleaver gets his message across in the strongest terms. He feels his message, feels it so deeply he must shout. If he seems always to be living on the edge, always talking about a blowup, the end of the world, it is because his message is all. After black liberation and racial harmony there is nothing, and without them nothing. He uses everything at hand, high-toned history alongside gutter rumors, insults, swear words, racial slurs.

Those early books were art of a sort; they still are. It is 10 years since they were written, but they stand strong. Cleaver was a front-rank polemicist. Good polemic, like good logic, endures, and is beautiful for its own sake. Cleaver's command of the tools of language shows in these lines from "The Courage to Kill: Meeting the Panthers," written in 1968:

The genie of black revolutionary violence is here, and it says that the oppressor has no rights which the oppressed are bound to respect. The genie also has a question for white Americans: Which side do you choose?… The cities of America have tasted the first flames of revolution. But a hotter fire rages in the hearts of black people today: total liberty for black people or total destruction for America.

This is the essence of Cleaver's message. Everything he wrote in the years before exile was directed against the "pigs of the power structure." The enemy enlisted his best energies and in conflict he turned out his best writing. Much of his work was finished in a hurry. But in spite of its practical intent and quick birth it remains remarkable. "The Death of Martin Luther King: Requiem for Nonviolence" was abandoned in midsentence when Cleaver was called away by Black Panthers in Oakland. While he was with them, a gun battle erupted with police in which a Panther leader, Bobby Hutton, was killed. "Requiem" is a stunning essay. Driven by mission, infuriated by the assassination of King, Cleaver is at the height of his powers. As with most of the things Cleaver wrote toward the goal of racial justice, "Requiem" goes beyond eloquent rage. It is polemic become art:

And it is strange to see how, with each significant shot that is fired, time is speeded up. How the dreadful days that we all somehow knew were coming seem to cascade down upon us immediately, and the dreadful hours that we thought were years away are immediately upon us, immediately before us. And all eternity is gone, blown away, washed away in the blood of martyrs.

The writ of habeas corpus permitting Cleaver to roam free after the Oakland shoot-out was revoked in November 1968. A day before he was to return to San Quentin, he escaped to Canada disguised as an old man. Cuba was an easy jump from there. Cleaver stayed in Havana a year before the nervous Cubans packed him off to Algeria. In Soul on Fire he says the young Algerian rebels now are old bureaucrats. He calls Castro a "cigar store revolutionary."

There are not many phrases like that in Soul on Fire. Cleaver visited North Korea, North Vietnam, and Red China between 1970 and 1973. He sank into disillusionment. While living secretly in Paris he dropped revolutionary dogma for flag-waving Americanism. Then he saw Christ in the moon. Such transformations should make exciting reading, but Cleaver, who performed so well as an adversary, cannot dramatize a change of heart. "I seemed to pivot, mentally and emotionally, between absolute despair and temporary hope," he writes. "As the American scene improved and the wretched climate of the sixties faded into the possible seventies, I revived my American dreams of returning."

He rekindles some of the fire when he recounts Black Panther days. But even then the writing is pale compared to earlier stuff. Cleaver's devotion to mission brought him success as a writer. Now, as a missionary, he writes carelessly. The Oakland shoot-out that, in Post-Prison Writings, began as Cleaver urinated on a lawn, in Soul on Fire starts as "a chance encounter." His wife's chapter-long transcript of a meeting with the Algiers police chief is printed verbatim. Cleaver has forgotten pacing.

And he preaches. He thanks the Lord again and again. "God hates sin but not the sinner," the inspired Cleaver writes, stealing somebody's line. "Praise God for His salvation, which is powerful and personal and life changing!" Cleaver's early writing spared the exclamation points yet shouted rage. His new hosannas are sincere but hell to read.

Soul on Fire, sloppy and ineffectual, defines Cleaver's place in American letters. He is a man who flourished in combat. His fury became art, opposition was his inspiration. Now, as a Christian convert, he must avoid confrontation. Animosity is sin. He has no enemies to rail against now, just the flock, to whom he must talk nice. Deprived of a cause, he may not write well again.