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Overview
The now-classic memoir that shocked, outraged, and ultimately changed the way America looked at the civil rights movement and the black experience.
By turns shocking and lyrical, unblinking and raw, the searingly honest memoirs of Eldridge Cleaver are a testament to his unique place in American history. Cleaver writes in Soul on Ice, "I'm perfectly aware that I'm in prison, that I'm a Negro, that I've been a rapist, and that I have a Higher Uneducation." What Cleaver shows us, on the pages of this now classic autobiography, is how much he was a man.
Finally back in print, the prison memoirs of Black Panther activist Eldridge Cleaver that shocked, outraged, and ultimately changed the way America looked at the Black experience.
Synopsis
The now-classic memoir that shocked, outraged, and ultimately changed the way America looked at the civil rights movement and the black experience.
By turns shocking and lyrical, unblinking and raw, the searingly honest memoirs of Eldridge Cleaver are a testament to his unique place in American history. Cleaver writes in Soul on Ice, "I'm perfectly aware that I'm in prison, that I'm a Negro, that I've been a rapist, and that I have a Higher Uneducation." What Cleaver shows us, on the pages of this now classic autobiography, is how much he was a man.
The New York Times Book Review - Charlayne Hunter
Brilliant and revealing....a highly readable and often witty book about the imprisonment of men's souls by society.
Editorials
Charlayne Hunter
Brilliant and revealing....a highly readable and often witty book about the imprisonment of men's souls by society.— The New York Times Book Review
Sacred Fire
Soul on Ice, written in 1954 when Cleaver was eighteen and prison marijuana charges and rape, is a searing, ground-breaking autobiography of a life lived on the edge and without remorse. His story became one of America's great literary and sociological discoveries. With it, Cleaver triumphed as a cultural critic, a social commentator, a sociologist, and a writer.After a series of religious experiences in prison, Cleaver became a Muslim convert, then a Muslim preacher of extraordinary eloquence and conviction, and then a firm follower of Malcolm X. He described his transformation through reading: "Through reading I was amazed to discover how confused people were. I had thought that, out there beyond the horizon of my own ignorance, unanimity existed, that even though I myself didn't know what was happening in the universe, other people certainly did." Much of Cleaver's commentary was on target because he'd walked the road and he knew the signs, and he was a man who, if nothing else, called things like he saw them. "It may be that I harm myself by speaking frankly and directly, but I do not care about that at all.... I know that by following the course which I have charted I will find my salvation. If I had followed the path laid down for me by the officials, I'd undoubtedly have long since been out of prison—but I'd be less than a man. I'd be weaker and less certain of where I want to go, what I want to do, and how to get there....