[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...