Midnight Rising

August 8, 2011
In this engrossing history of John Brown’s 1859 slave-liberation raid on the Harper’s Ferry, Va., arsenal, bestselling author Horwitz (Confederates in the Attic) concentrates on action set against deftly sketched historical background and compelling characters rendered without overdone psychologizing. His vivid biographical portrait of Brown gives us an American original: a failed businessman and harsh Calvinist with a soft spot for the oppressed and a murderous animus against oppressors (even if sometimes, as at Pottawatomie Creek in Kansas, his victims were unarmed). Brown’s raiders—a motley crew of his sons and various idealists, adventurers, freedmen, and fugitive slaves—come alive as a romantic, appealing bunch; their agonizing deaths give Horwitz’s excellent narrative of the raid and shootout a deep pathos. The author’s shrewd interpretation of Brown (similar to that of other scholars) makes him America’s great propagandist of his deed; after the raid ended in fiasco, he used his eloquent trial statements to transform himself in the public eye from madman and desperado to martyr and prophet—and a symbol who hardened both Northern and Southern militancy. But Horwitz smartly gives priority to the deeds themselves in this dramatic saga of an American white man who acted, rather than just talked, as if ending slavery mattered. 35 illus.; 2 maps.

September 1, 2011

A crisply written but not entirely original retelling of John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry.

Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and historian Horwitz returns to the Civil War era (A Voyage Long and Strange: Rediscovering the New World, 2008, etc.) and John Brown's infamous raid on the federal armory at Harpers Ferry in what is now West Virginia. The author depicts a morally upright abolitionist deeply committed to his cause but also well known for his "fixedness," a rigid stubbornness that could be a source of strength but was equally a source of weakness. Brown rose to notoriety on the basis of his violent abolitionist crusades in Bloody Kansas, but he had larger plans in mind; he imagined his raid would set in motion slave uprisings that would allow him to command a righteous army of liberation. Grand dreams gave way to grim reality soon after he set his scheme in motion in October 1859 with a small but loyal band of white and black followers. Soon Brown's men were overrun, and those who were not killed or who did not manage to escape faced the gallows. Among this group was Brown himself, whose hanging represented just retribution in the minds of many detractors, especially whites in the South, but served as equally apt martyrdom in the eyes of his supporters. Though the author's archival sleuthing pays off with a rich narrative, the book is one of many on the subject to appear in recent years, most notably David S. Reynolds' John Brown, Abolitionist (2005). Horwitz is a fine writer, but the narrative lacks deep historical analysis.

Lucid and compelling but hardly groundbreaking.

(COPYRIGHT (2011) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

May 15, 2011

A Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author of such gems as Confederates in the Attic, Horwitz reconstructs the 1859 raid on Harpers Ferry led by John Brown. Horwitz has the grace to capture this telling moment in American history and its far-ranging consequences. Expect demand, and look for the author on the "Truth or Dare" panel at LJ's Day of Dialog.

Copyright 2011 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

September 15, 2011
A portrait of John Brown and a blow-by-blow account of his 1859 attack on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, Horwitz's work rapidly generates narrative momentum. Horwitz also stresses Brown's Northern financial supporters and, more pertinently, his recruits for an insurrection whose bizarre planning, which included the idea of issuing medieval pikes to slaves, augured near-certain failure. Frederick Douglass warned Brown of such failure in a secret meeting, but Douglass' companion at the conclave, escaped slave Shields Green, joined Brown. So did his sons, daughters, sons-in-law, and assorted free blacks and white abolitionists, eliciting Horwitz's explorations of their individual situations and reasons for loyalty to Brown. It is as a fierce-eyed image of wrath and retribution that Brown appears to novelists, painters, and lyricists, but the historical Brown whom Horwitz reconstructs was more complicated. A financially feckless but domineering father, Brown always silenced murmurs within his band. A riveting re-creation of Brown and his famous, or infamous, raid.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2011, American Library Association.)