John Brown
Defending the Innocent or Plotting Terror?

This title is among my favorite biographies of all time. The profs teaching the class I took in college featured John Brown as a small figure in American contemporary history and dismissed him fairly quickly. He meant well, but was not stable, they said; in the end, he took extreme, hopeless measure......more

This is the definitive work on Brown. If you had to read only one book on the subject, this would be it. Du Bois manages to do what no other biographer has done, and I've read about a dozen books on Brown. Du Buois manages to place the man in context. After all, there are a whole lot of John Browns o......more

My only knowledge of John Brown prior to reading several books on him in the last year was that he had been a overzealous and unrealistic idealist that led a raid on Harper's Ferry to try to spark a slave rebellion. Reading more details about his planning and overall plan show the historical inaccur......more

"The cost of liberty is less than the price of repression." This was the refrain that Du Bois repeated, particularly in the last chapter of this surprising biography. I listened to it, and upon finishing, immediately had the urge to read much of it over again at once, in print, especially the beaut......more