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...