[Post-Prison Writings and Speeches] is hard reading, not because [Cleaver] has lost his gift for words, but because the cross and nails are so real, as is the unknowing assent to their use by the rest of us. The chase is real, the cruelty is inquisitional, the casualties and deaths paralyze the tongue.

The book is no sequel, in any usual sense, to Soul on Ice. It emerges from a crowded life. The language straddles street and hermitage. The meditations and outrage that Eldridge shares come from immediate crises in which he is always a participant, no matter how hard he attempted to exempt himself beforehand in his apprehension of the Adult Authority and his appetite for some degree of normalcy and calm.

The book is unkind. As is put by a Harlem proverb, "It's hard to love the landlord when the plumbing doesn't work." For Cleaver the plumbing of society stopped working before he was born. In fact his floor had never been served by it in the first place, at least not on this continent. Love of the landlord was incomprehensible from the beginning. Nor is there any evidence that Cleaver ever experienced "the Man" other than as an armed enemy preferring his death to societal renovation….

What is the wonder with Eldridge, what is the wonder and miracle and perhaps ultimate strength of the poor, is the ability to transcend these horrors, to remain sane, to hope that even still the earth will become a communal inheritance—to believe that the Lazarus of starving men and banquet tables will at last either rejoin humanity or leave it. All such hope and sanity has survived in Cleaver, despite the anger, and with it a certain holy doubt and humor about himself…. (p. 85)

If a grocer shoots to kill when his store is threatened with robbery, no protest is raised in the white community. The dogma is in the air we breathe, though best left unsaid: property is more sacred than life. If a black man declares, Let us defend ourselves, or if he determines that he no longer wishes to live in that burning house we call a way of life, the cries are heard: Violence! (as if pacifism were the American way); Reverse racism! (though it is not skin color but white passivity that black radicals cry out against); and, not least, You don't have to use that kind of language! (while those of angelic tongue go about the patriotic work of tolerating, even underwriting, the burning of black-haired people).

Cleaver is tough medicine. His book is grating. But it is generous in its honesty and even inspiring in its implied belief that communication is still worth attempting, that even we cushioned white people may at last discover that we too are being used and damaged and that revolution will not occur until more of us live out the revolution. (pp. 85-6)