Soul in a Maze

Target Zero: A Life in Writing offers a retrospective of Eldridge Cleaver's career, consisting of selections from his works, published and unpublished, dating from Soul on Ice, his 1968 post-prison manifesto, to the mellower writings that characterized the decades preceding his death in 1998. The question underpinning Target Zero is introduced in Henry Louis Gates, Jr.'s foreword, when Gates writes, "Even when I didn't understand Eldridge's opinions, I still admired him immensely. Eldridge's peers from his Black Panther years resented his religious and political conversions. But he was always firm in his beliefs despite the pain this rift inevitably caused him. Eldridge always had answers when I questioned him about his conversion to Christianity or his embrace of a most conservative approach to solving the problems of the black poor." Gates's words are admiring, but they also leave us wondering whether, if Gates can't finally make sense of Eldridge Cleaver's career, can we? Can Target Zero resuscitate Cleaver's reputation, or were his politics really just erratic and self-serving?