Rating: 
Summary: HIGHLY RECOMMEND
Review: This is a rather disturbing work, as it should be. It certainly gives one food for thought. Of course Historical fiction, is just that, fiction, or at least speculation on the author's part. The books should be read with this in mind. That being said, I found very few instances where the actual historical facts did not jive quite well with the story the author was telling. This was a dark period in our nations history and the more we examin it, the more we will appreciate what we have today. I very much recommend you add this one to your bookshelf. Again, I highly recommend it.
Rating:
Summary: Bearing Witness
Review: _Cloudsplitter_ is presented as an account of the life and work of radical abolitionist John Brown by surviving son, Owen Brown, who hoped to offer his writings to would be biographers of his father. According to Owen, John Brown would have objected to being described as an "abolitionist," a term he associated with such theorists as William Lloyd Garrison, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher, all who spoke eloquently of abolishing slavery but did nothing about it. John Brown preferred "action, action, action" in liberating blacks from their masters and destroying the slavocracy in pre-Civil War America. If accomplishing his goals meant murdering slave owners and their other male family members, then so be it. John Brown was true to his word when Congress passed the Kansas-Nebraska bill, after which drunken southern Border Ruffians and abolitionist free-soilers streamed into Kansas territory either to open Kansas to slavery or to keep it free. Many went into Kansas for the sole purpose of grabbing cheap land.John Brown, as dramatized in Russell Banks's stirring and provocative novel, was more than just the crazed zealot portrayed in history books. He was above all a loving and devoted father and husband who suffered greatly at the deaths of a number of his children at very young ages. John Brown was a deeply religious man who preached and sincerely believed in freedom for the black man. John Brown also viewed the Bible as a handbook for waging war on slave masters and firmly believed that God spoke directly with him and chose him as His instrument of liberation. It is with this belief that Brown gathered together a small rag-tag army of men (including several of his sons) in the raid on Harpers Ferry in 1859. Brown was certain that they would initiate a massive uprising of slaves against their masters. The great former slave, Frederick Douglass, while loving John Brown for his bravery and his great heart, understood both the white and the black man well and knew that Brown's efforts were doomed to failure. What makes _Cloudsplitter_ more than just an in-depth, three dimensional biographical novel of John Brown is Owen Brown's telling of his personal relationship with his father. Owen Brown was more than just his father's right-hand lieutenant. Owen's actions and very thoughts were completely dominated by his father. Owen lived under the yoke of John Brown as much as any black man did under the yoke of his white master. Comparing Owen Brown to his father, John Brown's best friend, a black man, told Owen that he was not even half the man his father was. This remark haunted Owen for the rest of his life. Many years later, Owen Brown, a lonely old man living in a secluded cabin, questioned whether he were finally out from under John Brown's influence or if he should be dead, lying near his father "where I have always properly belonged."
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