Soul on Ice is a collection of essays straight out of Dante's Inferno. The hell is there, and its name is America. Cleaver takes the reader on a journey down into the bowels of the nation, stopping to explore many of the levels of suffering. What he has to say about the black man in America, about the mystique of the white woman, about black heroes and villains, about Vietnam, and about the whole insane racial fabric of this country is said with freshness and insight and a power of conviction that will frighten those who like their truths diluted. As with Malcolm X, Cleaver's book is a spiritual autobiography. An odyssey of a soul in search of itself, groping toward a personal humanism which will give meaning to life.

Because this quest for individual dignity is at the core of the central dilemma of our times, this book is important. Because Cleaver has the consummate skill to express the inexpressible—to give shape to the time-bomb ticking in the black man's skull—this book is extraordinary. I welcome Eldridge Cleaver as a soul brother in despair. I welcome him also as an individual who is attempting in his writing to carve out a life style of his own.

Let those who would deny the book's essential truth deny it. Let those who would question the book's horrific vision question it. But let the white man no longer ask what the black man wants and why.

Where does Cleaver go from here? What happens to Cleaver, the black writer, depends on what happens to Cleaver, the black man. For those of us who believe that the writer must grapple with the moral issues of his day, that he must view himself in the context of events and not just from his own personal needs, these are dangerous times. The urge to be a full-time revolutionary in a country so desperately ill is overwhelming. Yet the writer must always retain a certain part of himself on the periphery of events if he is to be most effective. At last, one can only support the other, much as a rope supports a hanged man. Many of us are hanging in this year of fire, 1968. And America is hanging with us. Make no mistake about it. Barring unimaginable change, by summer this country will be a riot of color. And I am not speaking about the tulip beds along the Potomac. And neither is Eldridge Cleaver when he says that "no Slave should die a natural death. There is a point where Caution ends and Cowardice begins."

That is the point of no return. And for the American black man that point is right here and now. (pp. 44-5)