Target Zero: A Life in Writing

Former Black Panther information minister Eldridge Cleaver was a complex man who inspired profound adulation, love, rage, and, among many, fear. Target Zero brings Cleaver’s controversial story into focus through his own words. This books charts Cleaver's life through his writings: his quiet childhood, his youth spent in prison, his startling emergence as a Black Panther leader who became a "fugitive from justice" by the end of 1968, his seven-year exile, and his religious and political conversion following his return to the U.S. Target Zero, which brings together previously unpublished essays, short stories, letters, interviews, and poems, is the most significant collection of Eldridge Cleaver’s writing since his bestselling book Soul on Ice (1968).

Former Black Panther information minister Eldridge Cleaver was a complex man who inspired profound adulation, love, rage, and, among many, fear. Target Zero brings Cleaver’s controversial story into focus through his own words. This books charts Cleaver's life through his writings: his quiet childhood, his youth spent in prison, his startling emergence as a Black Panther leader who became a "fugitive from justice" by the end of 1968, his seven-year exile, and his religious and political conversion following his return to the U.S. Target Zero, which brings together previously unpublished essays, short stories, letters, interviews, and poems, is the most significant collection of Eldridge Cleaver’s writing since his bestselling book Soul on Ice (1968).

Kirkus Reviews

Selected works by prison philosopher and onetime Black Panther Party propagandist Cleaver, a divisive character in death as in life. Cleaver, the renowned author of Soul on Ice (1968), generously excerpted in the first part of this anthology, "entered prison about the same time the United States Supreme Court outlawed segregation in the school system." Inside Soledad, Cleaver became radicalized against a society that he and fellow prison activists regarded to be a continuation of the slave era; he also became something of a sociologist, writing piercingly about ethnic relations: "Blacks and whites do not fraternize in comfort here. . . . The whites want to talk with you out on the yard or at work, standing up, but they shun you when it comes to sitting down." After leaving prison and gaining prominence in the Panthers, Cleaver once again found himself in trouble with the law and fled to Algeria and Cuba, which he did not enjoy, and France, which he did. Yet Cleaver decided to return to the U.S.; in his unpublished autobiography, excerpted here, he reports that, despondent over being an exile, he was about to shoot himself when he had a vision of "the image of Jesus Christ" and decided to come home. That road-to-Damascus moment marked a conversion to capitalism as well as Christianity, which explains why Cleaver is sometimes scarcely mentioned in surveys of recent African-American history, though this anthology demonstrates that, capitalist and fundamentalist or no, Cleaver lost nothing of his revolutionary fervor or dogmatism in the bargain, as when he writes of the first Gulf War, "It is a tragic error . . . for Bush to align himself with the putrid elements of feudalism, in oppositionto the legitimate aspirations of the Arab/Islamic nation. . . . The desperate attempt by Saddam Hussein . . . is amazingly vicious, but also heroic and just."A well-made sampling of Cleaver's once-influential thought.

Eldridge Cleaver is the celebrated author of Soul on Ice and was the information minister of the Black Panther Party. Kathleen Cleaver is a senior lecturer at Yale University and at Emory Law School. She joined Eldridge Cleaver in the Black Panther Party in 1967, when they married. She is an attorney and author, and is currently at work on her memoir, Memories of Love and War.