It takes some stamina to get through this book; it is nearly 1000 pages long. I am only about halfway through, but I am already struck by the picture Banks paints of the abolitionist movement of the mid 1800s and of one family of abolitionists in particular: that of John Brown, who was hanged in the aftermath of the Harper’s Ferry raid of 1859. I have always thought of John Brown as a well-intentioned lunatic, but Banks paints the portrait of a man who finds himself facing a moral dillemna in a particular place and time, who chooses not to be caught in the flow of popular opinion, but to go against it, performing a necessary evil to further a cause that he believes in more than life itself. The book is written from the point of view of Owen Brown, John’s son, who doesn’t have the same spiritual and moral convictions as his father, but who chooses nevertheless to follow in his father’s footsteps. Banks is masterful at giving us the story of a man in conflict, one who is “looking through a glass darkly” and trying to discern the right path, even in the midst of not being wholeheartedly dedicated to that path.