[Soul on Fire] projects back to the sixties, when men and women, educators and policy-makers, blacks and whites were caught in a moral bind, demonstrating for human dignity and equal rights. And who better to articulate that era than a notorious black militant revolutionary?

By and by, the book contains all the "whats" the reader may want to know about Eldridge Cleaver. It is a collection of the events of his life that shaped him into the man he was to become…. There is retrospection on the Panther cause, its principles, terminology, possibilities and programs, and the public misconceptions of the Panther organization. There is reflection on the doctrine of Marxism, which Cleaver came to disavow because of its short-sighted materialism, and its lack of the historical tradition of respect for the individual and his rights, there are descriptions of his exile in Algiers and Paris, and his travels within North Korea, North Vietnam, China, Russia, Cuba and the Third World and his final disenchantment with their systems of government.

But more significantly, indeed more impressively, Soul on Fire is maybe the final chapter to Cleaver's becoming. I view his earlier book, Soul On Ice and this book as a unity, complementing each other as the two communicate Cleaver's personal, spiritual odyssey from provocative essayist to "born again" Christian. The two works read in conjunction give the whole story and complete insight into the man.

He is not simply a zealot or reactionary, but an individual who has experienced pain, injustice, and asks the philosophic question, "what is being?" He moves through Soul on Ice with a hunger to reaffirm his existence, sometimes in anger, sometimes with abundant pride, but the need is there to speak out, to comment, to seek truth. For Cleaver, that truth is finally found and realized through Christ….

Soul on Fire is Cleaver's proclamation of faith, and his exhortation for Christ. Cleaver is alive and well, again working within and for humanity, with a new identity and a new cause. He is a dynamic and remarkable individual with a lucid masculine style, though at moments the tone can be cynically bitter specifically when he looks back on the misrepresentation of the Panther cause or the killings of his black brothers. But Cleaver has not forsaken or forgotten the original passion for human dignity which inflamed him to reach out in his writings.