Synopsis
The history books record that John Brown led the failed raid on the federal armory at Harper's Ferry, Virginia, and was hanged for his crimes on December 2, 1859. It is perhaps less well known that he was the son of Ohio abolitionists; a divinity school dropout; a loyal husband and doting father of twenty children; a chronic business failure and bankrupt; an acquaintance of Emerson and Thoreau; an intimate of Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman; and a visionary who not only foresaw but made inevitable the bloody apocalypse that was the American Civil War.
Employing a provocative, wide-ranging collage of literary mediums and fictional devices - including private correspondence, diary and journal excerpts, newspaper articles, songs, poems, folktales, interviews, oral reminiscences, speeches, scriptural citations, epigraphs, interior monologues, and eyewitness recollections - the lot served up in an intricate mosaic of alternating narrative voices, Raising Holy Hell creates a colorful, multitextured evocation both of American slavery and of its most devout and deadly foe.
Reviews
YA?Hearing the words Harper's Ferry and abolition turns one's thoughts to John Brown, the man best known for his failed attempt to raid the armory at Harper's Ferry. But the less well known side of his life is a more fascinating tale and reading it in a fictional format is perhaps the only way one can bear its unrelenting grimness. Brown was a religious fanatic, a self-flagellator, an inept businessman who kept his family impoverished and cared only about removing the scourge of slavery from America. The story is told through a series of interviews, documents, journal articles, and quotations, similar to Avi's Nothing But the Truth (Orchard, 1991), which softens Brown's rigidity and tempers the horror of his life. In setting historical background, one particularly poignant section describes the terror Africans must have felt when they were first captured, followed by the horrendous conditions they endured on their overseas voyage. A powerful, thought-provoking work.?Pam Spencer, Fairfax County Public Schools, VA
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Through a montage of real and fabricated quotations from historical documents, witnesses and participants, and through the words of an omniscient and oddly ironic narrator, first-novelist Olds offers a fascinating study of slavery in the U.S. and of one of its most ardent opponents, the enigmatic John Brown, whose violent abolitionist crusades foreshadowed-and, arguably, precipitated-the Civil War. This protean narrative, part biography, part essay, traces Brown's life from his childhood in the Ohio of the early 1800s through his execution in Virginia at age 59, while simultaneously encapsulating various American attitudes-both personal and institutional-toward slavery and its victims. National heroes-including Lincoln, Jefferson and Washington-are skewered, sometimes with their own euphemistic bigotry, for their complicity in Southern slavery. Antislavery forces in the territories are portrayed as racists who merely want black people, free or enslaved, kept far away from their new homes. Historic figures like Robert E. Lee, Harriet Tubman, Horace Greeley and Frederick Douglass offer their impressions of Brown and his mission. Olds's mixture of novelistic and quasi-documentarian narrative produces a remarkably complex portrait of the paradoxical zealot. The inevitability of the strangely anticlimactic conflict at Harper's Ferry, Va., creates tension throughout, while the narrator's succinct, sometimes mordant commentary highlights elements of American history not fully acknowledged even today. 50,000 first printing; author tour.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Early in the lives of many American children, the ballad of John Brown, the one about his body lying "a-smoldering in the grave," is introduced, and morbid curiosity begins. Why is the body smoldering? we wondered. Olds may have wondered that, too. Something compelling surely drove him to seek out this archetypal, mad character and produce a revealing novel that satisfies our childhood curiousity. But this is no child's book. Olds' quest for John Brown, slavery-hating icon, arguably the spark that set off the Civil War, led him down a treacherous path before yielding a devastating vision of an uncommon man. Readers witness the danger of that journey, for it sprawls before them in the private correspondence, diary and journal excerpts, newspaper articles, songs, poems, interviews, speeches, scriptural citations, interior monologues (of such historic figures as Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass, Lincoln, Robert E. Lee), and eyewitness recollections that all come together so powerfully to form the novel. All this diversity is untamed by a formal chapter structure or a single point of view. Yet the reader, neither bothered nor distracted, is driven from page to page, thirsting after the next revelation, the deeper understanding of American slavery, the true purpose behind John Brown's attack on the armory at Harper's Ferry, Virginia, the death by hanging on December 2, 1859, and, finally, the smoldering body. Was this flagellant simply mad? The way Olds juxtaposes Brown's acts to the reign of terror that was slavery practically dismisses the question. A hauntingly excellent and singular first novel. Bonnie Smothers
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