Midnight Rising (Horwitz)

Book Reviews
Horwitz has given us a hard-driving narrative of one of America's most troubling historical figures: the fearsome John Brown, whose blood-soaked raid on the federal armory at Harpers Ferry, Va., in October 1859…helped to push the nation into the most devastating war it would ever endure.
Kevin Boyle - New York Times


Horwitz, an exceptionally skilled and accomplished journalist…here turns his hand to pure history with admirable results. Midnight Rising is smoothly written, thoroughly researched, places Brown within the context of his time and place, and treats him sensitively but scarcely adoringly…Without sentimentalizing him, Tony Horwitz has given [Brown] his due.
Jonathan  Yardley - Washington Post


Horwitz’s skills are a good match for this enormously compelling character, and his well-paced narrative incorporates masterful sketches of Brown’s family, foot soldiers, financial backers, admirers and prosecutors.… The result is both page-turning and heartbreaking—a book to engage mind and soul.
Boston Globe


What do you call John Brown? Is he a terrorist or a freedom fighter?... Tony Horwitz settles upon the word insurgent—and the label seems just right, as does Horwitz’s book as a whole… Midnight Rising rolls through a series of indelible scenes… The book becomes a graceful narrative, ever engaging, with the reader allowed to connect Brown and his contemporaries to conflicts that continue to our day.
Seattle Times


Horwitz’s description of the little band of idealists and adventurers who signed on for Brown’s offensive—including five black men and two of Brown’s own sons—is both fascinating and touching. His careful recreation of the bloody events of October 16, 1859, the day of Brown’s disastrous raid on Harpers Ferry, is both suspenseful and heartwrenching.
Christian Science Monitor


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.
Publishers Weekly


Horwitz (Confederates in the Attic), Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and best-selling author, presents a gripping narrative of Brown and the raid on Harpers Ferry that in many ways set the stage for Southern secession and civil war. Horwitz brings all his gifts of character building and storytelling to Brown's rise and self-promotion as an instrument of a supposed God-ordained command to purge with blood the land of the sin of slavery.... Verdict: Horwitz's Brown did not die in vain. By recalling the drama that fired the imagination and fears of Brown's time, Midnight Rising calls readers to account for complacency about social injustices today. This is a book for our time. —Randall M. Miller, Saint Joseph's Univ., Philadelphia
Library Journal


Horwitz’s potent prose delivers the facts of this bellwether incident in riveting fashion… It is an absorbing portrait of the often frustrated but passionately driven firebrand who successfully convinced a country of the shame of slavery and, to the South’s great regret, earned martyr status in the aftermath of his execution. Brown qualifies as America’s first important post-revolution terrorist… Horwitz brings events to life with almost cinematic clarity, and for American history and Civil War aficionados, Midnight Rising is required reading.
Bookpage


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...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....Though the author's archival sleuthing pays off with a rich narrative,...[it] lacks deep historical analysis. Lucid and compelling but hardly groundbreaking.
Kirkus Reviews