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Title: Soul on Ice by Eldridge Cleaver ISBN: 0-385-33379-X Publisher: Delta Pub. Date: 01 February, 1999 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $13.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.73 (26 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: the real deal from an educated black man
Comment: racism is still alive and well in the USA, despite surface gains by some people of color. this book goes into a theory for black/white tensions: the primeval mitosis, when humanity split into male/female, black/white, etc. and our dichotimies became external rather than held within each human. eldridge has some very serious ideas about why our gender roles are lined up with "race," and how the Body and Mind have become province to certain ethnicities. to heal our world, all humans must become whole: Mind, Body merging instead of blacks being all Body "supermasculine menials" and whites being "omnipotentent administrators." eldridge's glance into inter-racial love are interesting, if not at times confusing since he fell in love with his own (white) lawyer. eldridge's writing is strong and his prose is evocative. i think the best essay in this book is the one on primeval motosis, where he lays out his theory on tensions between the races. but all of them are excellent, especially when cleaver examines the vietnam war and wars against colonionalism the world over and links colonial/liberation struggles to the struggle for equality in the US! deep stuff, seeing as how "liberation" has been "won" because all nations, no matter how squalid and repressed, have the honor of participating in capitalism (aka globalism). blacks and other oppressed people in the USA have also bought into the switcheroo. read cleaver and see that many of the issues happening in the late 60s have not been resolved.
another thing i often found myself thinking: for a man who was incarcerated, and before the advent of the internet, cleaver must have put in so much effort to get the political/social information he did. even prison can not hold the mind/thoughts of someone who will reach out despite constraints.
Rating: 2
Summary: Between Twist and Revolution: Soul Power in the 1960s
Comment: Using humor, love letters, essays, poetic language, and Marxist/Leftist rhetoric Eldridge Cleaver's "Soul on Ice" creatively outlines a perspective from which the 1960s might best be approached: "the smell of anger, tear gas, and the sound of skull-cracking billy clubs, helicopters, and revolution is present in its pages". "Soul on Ice" is a classic whose achievements are manifold. Here are three of the strongest:
1) In 1992, when Malcolm X was being transformed into a fashion accessory/popular culture icon and the black influence on the cultural politics of the 1960s whitewashed, the reissue of Cleaver's book reminded us that "what was great was not Malcolm X but the truth he uttered" and that the survival of black genius is crucial to the good mental health of white America.
2) Inasmuch as the 1960s of the Civil Rights-Black Power Movement was about closing ranks -among other things- "Soul on Ice" did not support any dysfunctional black unity, which explains its challenge of author James Baldwin's unconstructive and unfair criticisms of writer Richard Wright and Negritude advocate Aimé Césaire.
3) Useful condemnations of slavery's racist (re) presentation of black/American sexual politics (subtle or blatant) can be found in the pages of Cleaver's book; it anticipated much of the contemporary scholarship intervening in part or wholly in this domain: Ed Guerrero's "Framing Blackness", Mike Marqusee's "Redemption Song", and Spike Lee's cultural politics and cinema.
Cleaver had his soul on ice but managed to produce this brilliant collection of essays. As readers we must, in turn, freeze "Soul on Ice" in the 1960s fridge; let us consume it 1960s-frozen for therein lies its Twist(ed)-Hula-Hoop(ed) richness. The author of "Soul on Ice" was no prophet, just an intelligent angry young black man who wrote under duress during an era when it was very difficult for his people to free their psyches from subjugation to the point where they could "say it loud: I am black and I am proud!".
Rating: 2
Summary: Justification for the Unjustifiable
Comment: I have seldom read anything as offensive as Cleaver's attempt to pass off rape as a "revolutionary" act. By his own admission he is a serial rapist,and if he'd served time for all of them would never even have been out of jail in the sixties in the first place! While the other content of this book isn't totally worthless, I found that Cleaver came off as a typical criminal, filled with reasons why SOMEBODY ELSE was responsible for everything he did wrong. The first step to self respect is to accept responsibility for one's actions, Cleaver has not done that, nor does he give the slightest indication that he ever will. If you want to read an autobiography of a panther read Huey Newton's, because with Newton, instead of self pity, there was substance and intelligence behind the anger.
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Title: The Autobiography of Malcolm X by Malcolm X ISBN: 0345350685 Publisher: Ballantine Books Pub. Date: 01 December, 1989 List Price(USD): $7.99 |
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Title: Assata: An Autobiography by Assata Shakur ISBN: 1556520743 Publisher: Lawrence Hill Books Pub. Date: 01 October, 1987 List Price(USD): $14.95 |
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Title: Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters of George Jackson by George Jackson ISBN: 1556522304 Publisher: Lawrence Hill Books Pub. Date: 01 September, 1994 List Price(USD): $16.95 |
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Title: Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America by Stokely Carmichael, Charles V. Hamilton, Kwame Ture ISBN: 0679743138 Publisher: Vintage Books USA Pub. Date: 01 November, 1992 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
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Title: Angela Davis: An Autobiography by Angela Yvonne Davis ISBN: 0717806677 Publisher: International Publishers Pub. Date: 01 March, 1989 List Price(USD): $14.95 |
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