JOHN BROWN

A quiet, balanced biography of the savage old prophet --withholding condemnation or excessive admiration. Beginning with John Brown's boyhood in Hudson, Ohio, his first contact with a slave, through his many travels in plenty and poverty -- Pennsylvania, New York, New England, even England, and finally Kansas; his occupations -- surveyor, tanner, farmer, cattle driver, wool trader and worker on Gerritt Smith's experimental colony for Negroes; to his fight for a ""free"" United States -- the endless meetings with Eastern Abolitionists (a Provisional Constitution which he had written, under his arm) a merciless killing of five pro-slavery men in Kansas, the formation of his guerrilla band and final defeat at Harpers Ferry. The author has caught the strength and magnetism of this God-driven man and captures the force of a magnetic personality with a vision and a religious dedication.