The style throughout [Soul on Ice] is pop Leftism, a mixture of sex and revolution characteristic of the New Left around the world…. Horst Krueger describes this combination as it appears in West Germany: "the era of Sex and Socialism. Eros is on the Left and beautiful is our youthful rebellion. Make love and carry the banner of the Vietcong high." Cleaver adds to this a brashly violent note and a sure literary talent….

A Black Muslim who renounced Elijah Muhammed's teachings to join Malcolm X, Cleaver pronounces the white world doomed. Differentiating good white people from bad, however, he sees young white radicals joining Negroes in building a Socialism in the United States that is similar to "third world" Marxism.

More interesting is Cleaver's obsession with white women: "It intensified my frustrations to know that I was indoctrinated to see the white woman as more beautiful and desirable than my own black woman." About the white woman who caused Emmett Till's murder by accusing him of flirting with her, he writes: "I looked at her picture again and again, and in spite of everything and against my will and the hate I felt for the woman and all that she represented, she appealed to me." (p. 23)

The subject recurs, but Cleaver never really deals with it in depth, although sexual love for whites is the basis on which he condemns James Baldwin [in his essay "Notes on a Native Son"]. He considers Baldwin a prisoner of his lust for white men, and compares him unfavorably with Richard Wright. Addressing him as "Sugar," he says that Baldwin's character in Another Country, Rufus Scott, "the weak craven-hearted ghost," is to Bigger Thomas in Native Son, "the black rebel of the ghetto and a man," what Baldwin is to "the fallen giant," Wright. For Baldwin, "the only way out … psychologically is to embrace Africa, the land of his fathers, which he refuses to do." Richard Wright "reigns supreme for his profound political, economic and social reference"; Baldwin's "characters all seem to be fucking and sucking in a vacuum."

At the close of this essay on Baldwin, Cleaver points to the prophets: "'Will the machine gunners please step forward,' said Leroi Jones in a poem. 'The machine gun on the corner,' wrote Richard Wright, 'is the symbol of the 20th century.'" And, of course, [Norman] Mailer: "There's a shit-storm coming."

In an essay in Notes of a Native Son, James Baldwin observed, "the reality of man as a social being is not his only reality and that artist is strangled who is forced to deal with human beings solely in social terms." Cleaver restricts his own potential, confining his writing to a series of machine-gun blasts that capture the mood of the black militants. He reveals an innate gift for language at every turn, but he makes it the servant of the fashions of a political movement. When the movement assumes new directions (one assumes that the trend toward nihilism and self-destruction ultimately will change), hopefully Cleaver will find that his stylish Leftism was a small achievement measured against the talent he could develop if he tries. (pp. 23-4)

[By] forcing all his experiences into a social mold, he too often excludes complexity, ambiguity, the variety of human beings. His people are millions of black cardboard figures getting into revolutionary formation. Not one distinguishable human being, not one unique personality, appears in these pages. Not even Cleaver himself. (p. 24)