All the essays [in Soul on Ice] deal with racial hurt, racial struggle, and racial pride. Mr. Cleaver is a black man, and he is not going to let either himself or anyone else forget that fact—in case it is possible for an American of either race to do so. Ralph Ellison and even James Baldwin want above all to be writers, and Cleaver says no, that is impossible, that is foolish, and certainly that is wrong.

I am with Ellison and Baldwin all the way, but the author of a book with the stark, unrelenting title Soul on Ice would expect that of me, a reasonably unharassed white middle-class professional man who, really, in many ways had it made from birth. I don't at all like the nasty, spiteful way Mr. Cleaver writes off Invisible Man or Another Country. I don't like the arrogant and cruel...