V NEW BOOKS
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Megan Marshall ’77, RI ’07, REVIEWER
A Sense of Being There
“W
alking in the footsteps of history isn’t the same as being there,” Tony Horwitz writes in the opening pages of Midnight Rising: John Brown and the Raid That Sparked the Civil War. It’s a surprising statement from Horwitz, who has succeeded in making himself the most innovative popularizer of American history since David McCullough dared to stand in front of a TV camera. Horwitz has practiced a unique brand of participatory journalism: suiting up as a Civil War re-enactor, trekking much of the perimeter of the Continental United States to retrace the routes of the North American explorers, and then writing up his adventures. But in Midnight Rising, after a short paragraph detailing a 150th-anniversary nocturnal pilgrimage in commemoration of Brown’s historic march into Harper’s Ferry, Horwitz withdraws from the scene and gives us a straight narrative of the quixotic military action that galvanized both North and South the year before war broke out. His sixth book, which provides his readers with a sense of “being there” even more effectively than his previous first-person historical travelogues, may be his best so far. It has been said that without John Brown there would have been no Civil War. One recent biographer, David Reynolds, called the Harper’s Ferry raid a microcosm of the war, involving many of the era’s key players who are still household names—from Robert E. Lee, the supervisor at Brown’s capture, to John Wilkes Booth, a witness to Brown’s hanging who took inspiration from the moment. But Horwitz leaves such speculation behind and gives us instead a novel of fact, a work that demonstrates how, in Herman Melville’s poetic summation, John Brown’s “streaming beard” became the “meteor of the war.” Horwitz recounts not just John Brown’s rise from obscure rural origins to become the man who even his opponents admired as possessing “the most complete fearlessness of & insensibility to danger and death” in seeking to advance his cause—the liberation of all the slaves of the South in one bold strike. He also recounts the diverse stories of Brown’s comrades in the action, including two sons who died at Harper’s Ferry and six men, among them two African Americans, who survived, only to be tried, found guilty, and “publicly murdered,” in Brown’s phrase. Especially intriguing is the charismatic 26-year-old Aaron Stevens, whose good looks and eloquent words helped stir abolitionist fervor in the North as he, too, calmly faced what he termed “one of the best of deaths.” Midnight Rising: John Brown and the Raid That Sparked the Civil War by Tony Horwitz RI ’06 Henry Holt, 365 pp.
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r a dcliffe ma ga zi ne Winter 2012
S
ome novelists achieve high art by delivering up a set of characters so multidimensional or involuted that none of them, in the end, is appealing. Ann Patchett takes the opposite tack, creating with each new novel an ensemble cast for whom our sympathy is aroused from the opening scenes. In State of Wonder, everyone, even the monomaniacal scientist around whom the plot swirls, Dr. Annick Swenson—a female Mr. Kurtz with an endocrinology lab deep in the jungles of Brazil—turns out to be worthy of our compassionate interest. The premise may seem improbable: Marina Singh, researcher for a midwestern pharmaceutical company called Vogel, iis di dispatched t h d to retrieve the body of her former lab partner, Anders Eckman, whose death in the Amazon while tracking the elusive Dr. Swenson has traumatized both Marina and Anders’s widow, Karen, and threatens the financial well-being of Marina’s employer. Vogel has been counting on Dr. Swenson to derive a fertility-extending drug from the hormones of the women of a hidden tribe, the Lakashi, who are capable of bearing children into old age. Patchett’s narrative powers make the improbable seem not just likely but rich with human truth; we receive this finely wrought tale as Marina does the unbidden memories that drive her forward in her task, “with no small amount of wonder.” State of Wonder: A Novel by Ann Patchett BI ’94 HarperCollins, 353 pp.
C
aleb’s Crossing is really the story of Bethia Mayfield, a girl growing up on Martha’s Vineyard “a person of the first light,” as she thinks of herself, a member of the first generation of Puritan colonists born in New England. With her restless spirit and Caleb’s Crossing: A Novel by Geraldine Brooks RI ’06 Viking, 306 pp.
Illustration by anthony russo