Reviewing Eldridge Cleaver's second book, Post-Prison Speeches and Writings, demands a critical license like that of reviewing the aspects of a man's life which consigned him to purgatory. Moreover, the review itself can offer little promise of comfort and less in the way of advice to the man in question, whose likely response would be: "If I could live life all over again, I'd do the same thing." There is, then, but one legitimate line of investigation, since we already know why the man lived the way he did. This approach would ask two questions, "Why must he do it again in that way, if he could?" and "Is there really no other way?"

But even this tack is not very promising, because it offers no easy answers to these questions which would even begin to satisfy those who adhere to any of today's "revolutionary" trends in America...