[In the following review, Johnson recounts Cleaver's life as related in Soul on Fire.]

In November 1968 Eldridge Cleaver, the Minister of Information of the Black Panther Party, jumped bail in California and absconded to Cuba. Cleaver, who had expounded at length his stirringly militant Black Power beliefs in the best-selling Soul on Ice, was then at the height of his notoriety. It was the era of the police shoot-outs with the Panthers, and brother Eldridge was talking more or less openly of carrying the struggle into regularised urban guerrilla warfare. From exile he continued to hatch similar plans. From their training center in Cuba the Panthers would launch an invasion of the US through Mexico, setting up guerrilla bases in the Rocky Mountain West, gradually expanding via the Alleghenies and Appalachians to the Blue Ridge Mountains …

For campus radicals the exciting thing about the Panthers was their gun-cult. But Cleaver had been wearing and using a pistol for years before that, and at 31 was the veteran of two reform schools and four jails. After a desperately underprivileged ghetto childhood—mainly one long, hideous and unsuccessful struggle to slop his father beating up his mother—he had gravitated to 'the rape routine in the motel circuit', the drugs racket and other forms of gangsterism.

He soon fell out with the Cubans—they didn't like Panther gun-toting and he condemned Castro's 'white racism'. He was shipped on to Algiers where the Panthers were accorded liberation movement status. From this base Cleaver travelled all over the Third and Communist worlds 'in free-flow control of my revolutionary destiny', as he puts it. From Pyongyang he informed the Panthers that the true guide of the revolutionary struggle was 'none other than Comrade Kim Il Sung'.

Meanwhile friction developed between the Algerian government and the Algiers Panther community of 'hijackers, bank-robbers and revolutionary Communists'. Outside militant duty-hours, some of the Panthers were dating the girls from the US Embassy and managed to steal official visas and documents. With these Cleaver and his merry men went into a lucrative international racket in forged papers, branching out into currency fraud, drugs, and a stolen-car racket extending to Britain, Germany, Italy and Holland. The showdown with the Algerians came when Cleaver denounced Boumedienne for betraying the revolution after the Algiers government had refused to hand over to the Panthers $1.5 million extorted by a Panther plane-hijacker.

Cleaver, deciding to 'come out of the Third World and the Communist/Socialist world altogether', decamped to Paris where he lived illegally, his pleas for political asylum being taken up by Sartre, De Beauvoir and François Mitterrand. His problems were solved when a friend introduced him to Giscard d'Estaing, then Minister of Finance. Giscard, amazingly, got his then ally Chirac, the Minister of the Interior, to fiddle the papers, and brother Eldridge settled down in some comfort (a Paris flat and another on the Riviera) in time to watch his patron become President. But was our hero happy at last? No indeed: he got more and more homesick and fell into such misery that he saw a vision in which all his revolutionary heroes paraded before his eyes, with the figure of Jesus Christ bringing up the tail of the procession. 'That', he remarks, 'was the last straw.' To the amazement of the French he decided to surrender to the US authorities and to go home to face jail.

Home he went, by now well on the way to being born again (he was seeing quite a lot more of Jesus). After only eight months in jail he was befriended by one Arthur De Moss, President of the National Liberty Corporation, who recognised Eldridge as his brother in Christ to the tune of putting up $100,000 in bail for him. (It is only thanks to Art's godly afterword to this volume [Soul on Fire] that we learn that brother Eldridge is still facing a charge of assault with intent to kill.) By this stage Eldridge was deep into his born-again trip and found several new buddies-in-Christ, including Billy Graham and Chuck Colson, the Watergate star. Not surprisingly our tale ends with Eldridge running Eldridge Cleaver Crusades and re-emerging as a media performer with Bible in hand. Among those for whom he prays, he tells us, is Richard Nixon.