Rating: 
Summary: Without a Doubt Henry Mayer's Magnum Opus
Review: This is an absolutely breathtaking display of passionate and organized thinking and writing. Mayer gets right to the point. Here is the first paragraph from the Preface to this book (he puts the first three lines are in all caps, just in case some people might have trouble "missing" his point):"ALL ON FIRE IS A BOUT ABOUT AN AGITATOR, AND ITS ARGUMENT CAN BE SIMPLY STATED. WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON (1805-1879) IS AN AUTHENTIC AMERICAN HERO WHO, WITH A BIBLICAL PROPHET'S POWER AND A Propagandist's skill, forced the nation to confront the most crucial moral issue in its history. For thirty-five years he edited and published a weekly newspaper in Boston, The Liberator, which remains today a sterling and unrivaled example of personal journalism in the service of civic idealism. Although Garrison--a self-made man with a scanty formal education--considered himself "a New England mechanic" and lived outside the precincts of the American intelligentsia, he nonetheless did the hard intellectual work of challenging orthodoxy, questioning public policy, and offering a luminous vision of a society transformed. He inspired two generations of activists--female and male, black and white--and together they built a social movement which, like the civil rights movement of our own day, was a collaboration of ordinary people, stirred by injustice and committed to each other, who achieved a social change that conventional wisdom first condemned as wrong and then ridiculed as impossible." It is a rare and beautiful thing when a biographer and his/her subject are so perfectly matched. It will inform you, excite you, and will leave you in tears in places. High drama. Garrison himself would have been proud of this work. Hopefully this book will rescue this wonderful American from the unbelievable bile his opponents still continue to spew about him.
Rating:
Summary: Without a Doubt Henry Mayer's Magnum Opus
Review: This is an absolutely breathtaking display of passionate and organized thinking and writing. Mayer gets right to the point. Here is the first paragraph from the Preface to this book (he puts the first three lines are in all caps, just in case some people might have trouble "missing" his point): "ALL ON FIRE IS A BOUT ABOUT AN AGITATOR, AND ITS ARGUMENT CAN BE SIMPLY STATED. WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON (1805-1879) IS AN AUTHENTIC AMERICAN HERO WHO, WITH A BIBLICAL PROPHET'S POWER AND A Propagandist's skill, forced the nation to confront the most crucial moral issue in its history. For thirty-five years he edited and published a weekly newspaper in Boston, The Liberator, which remains today a sterling and unrivaled example of personal journalism in the service of civic idealism. Although Garrison--a self-made man with a scanty formal education--considered himself "a New England mechanic" and lived outside the precincts of the American intelligentsia, he nonetheless did the hard intellectual work of challenging orthodoxy, questioning public policy, and offering a luminous vision of a society transformed. He inspired two generations of activists--female and male, black and white--and together they built a social movement which, like the civil rights movement of our own day, was a collaboration of ordinary people, stirred by injustice and committed to each other, who achieved a social change that conventional wisdom first condemned as wrong and then ridiculed as impossible." It is a rare and beautiful thing when a biographer and his/her subject are so perfectly matched. It will inform you, excite you, and will leave you in tears in places. High drama. Garrison himself would have been proud of this work. Hopefully this book will rescue this wonderful American from the unbelievable bile his opponents still continue to spew about him.
Rating:
Summary: A Superior Biography
Review: This is the last and probably the best book completed by the late Henry Mayer. Mayer admired Garrison, the most important leader of the abolitionist movement. In this book, he succeeds in renovating the reputation of a great reformer and activist who has often been neglected or written off as a crank. Garrison and the abolitionists were originally hardly more popular in the North than in the South. They were seen as disrupting the Union and were regarded with suspicion for their pro-black beliefs - public opinion in the North was only marginally less racist than in Dixie. Garrison's courage and consistent refusal to trim his convictions for popular acceptance led to a career with an outsized share of controversy, oppobrium, and in several cases physical danger. Some reviewers have felt the book is too long, and it is hefty. But the length is necessary for Mayer to give a full portrait, which shows not only the man, but also the era he lived in. In particular, Mayer writes extensively about abolitionism as a movement. Abolitionists, and Garrison himself, struggled with many problems - whether to compromise by supporting politicians whose platforms called for less than full abolition, evolving from a paternalist movement of mostly privileged whites to a movement in which free blacks and escaped slaves could play a meaningful role, and reconciling the pacifist leanings of many to their role in a war against slaveholders - that will be of interest to contemporary political activists. Mayer also shows how, after abolition was accomplished, former abolitionists seeking new causes worked for other advances, including the first stirrings of the women's suffrage movement.
Rating:
Summary: A Superior Biography
Review: This is the last and probably the best book completed by the late Henry Mayer. Mayer admired Garrison, the most important leader of the abolitionist movement. In this book, he succeeds in renovating the reputation of a great reformer and activist who has often been neglected or written off as a crank. Garrison and the abolitionists were originally hardly more popular in the North than in the South. They were seen as disrupting the Union and were regarded with suspicion for their pro-black beliefs - public opinion in the North was only marginally less racist than in Dixie. Garrison's courage and consistent refusal to trim his convictions for popular acceptance led to a career with an outsized share of controversy, oppobrium, and in several cases physical danger. Some reviewers have felt the book is too long, and it is hefty. But the length is necessary for Mayer to give a full portrait, which shows not only the man, but also the era he lived in. In particular, Mayer writes extensively about abolitionism as a movement. Abolitionists, and Garrison himself, struggled with many problems - whether to compromise by supporting politicians whose platforms called for less than full abolition, evolving from a paternalist movement of mostly privileged whites to a movement in which free blacks and escaped slaves could play a meaningful role, and reconciling the pacifist leanings of many to their role in a war against slaveholders - that will be of interest to contemporary political activists. Mayer also shows how, after abolition was accomplished, former abolitionists seeking new causes worked for other advances, including the first stirrings of the women's suffrage movement.
Rating: 
Summary: A biography long over-due
Review: William Lloyd Garrison was a man ahead of his time. Not by years or even decades, but centuries. In the 1830s he was an outspoken proponent of not just the abolition of slavery (many advocated various ways to deal with the South's "peculiar institution"), but called for the immediate abolition of slavery with complete and full civil rights for African-Americans. He dreamed of a time when a black woman might succeed a black man as Secretary of State a decade before the Supreme Court ruled that blacks were something less than human in the infamous Dredd Scott decision. He was also an early advocate of women's rights, labor reform, temperance and civil disobedience, as well as an outspoken critic of organized religion (Garrison was what we might today call a fundamentalist "born again Christian" who recognized no formal church other than Christ's teachings).
Given Garrison's role as founding father of the abolitionist movement, his passion for the cause, longevity in leadership and terminal impact on the greatest political issue of the nineteenth century it is puzzling that he has left such an obscure historical legacy. As author Herbert Mayer notes, Martin Luther King Jr. cited Gandhi, Thoreau and the Gospel as his inspiration and motivation in the Civil Rights movement with no reference to the man whose peaceful agitation did more to eradicate bondage than any other -- and who in turn may very well have been Thoreau's inspiration in writing "Civil Disobedience."
So why the obscurity? Mayer's biography does little to address this paradox. In fact, his book makes Garrison's general absence from the mainstream of American history all the more tenebrous. The man that emerges from the pages of "All on Fire" is a moral giant, a crusader in the purest and best sense of the word, who risked -- indeed, welcomed -- verbal and physical abuse, a life of indigence and scorn, all in pursuit of a truly noble cause. Garrison grew up in New England and never traveled further south than Baltimore until after the Civil War, yet he dedicated his life to the abolition of slavery with an intensity and zeal that surpassed dissident southern whites (such as the Grimke sisters) and even some blacks that had escaped from bondage themselves. Because of his central role in establishing and leading the cause, "All on Fire" is, as the full title suggests, as much a history of the entire abolitionist movement as it is a biography of its leading agitator.
However, a close reading of "All on Fire" also reveals a hidden side of William Lloyd Garrison that Mayer, unfortunately, never fully explores: a man of extreme ambition, vanity, and conceit. Garrison fought tenaciously to keep himself at the front-and-center of the moral movement he came to regard as his own. One senses that the fame and notoriety he gained by his agitation came to mean quite a lot to him. In this sense, Garrison reminds one of a contemporary political gadfly increasingly enamored of his high-profile image: Michael Moore. Perhaps Garrison's attraction to celebrity never fully outweighed his commitment to the ultimate prize of freeing three million humans from bondage, but it certainly meant more than the pious Christian in him would have liked to admit -- and certainly more than biographer Mayer is willing to concede. Again and again throughout the narrative Garrison experiences a painful and personal falling out with some of his closest friends and coadjutors: Frederick Douglas, Wendell Phillips, the Tappan brothers, etc. And time after time Mayer attributes the rift to simple misunderstandings or the result of the stress and pressure of the times. That Garrison might have been something less than the Galahad on ante-bellum America is left unexplored.
Nevertheless, for anyone with a desire to know more about America and especially to learn about a man that was once one of the most controversial and well-known figures of his century, only to sink to near anonymity, this National Book Award finalist can be highly recommended.
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