MIDNIGHT RISING: John Brown and the Raid That Sparked the Civil War
By Tony Horwitz
Holt, 384 pp., $29
Not long after abolitionist John Brown led his band of men to seize the federal armory in Harpers Ferry, Va., a newspaper in Baltimore pondered how the 1859 events would be remembered a century later. As Tony Horwitz reports, the top options were “Insurrection,’’ “Rebellion,’’ “Uprising,’’ and “Invasion.’’ Although today’s schoolchildren learn of Brown as the perpetrator of a mere “raid,’’ a footnote to the more important battles of the Civil War, his story gripped Americans at the time, hardening positions on both sides of the slavery issue and foreshadowing the war that now seemed inevitable. By the time Brown was captured and tried for murder, treason, and conspiring with slaves he had become a cause célèbre, admired by Thoreau and Emerson, who proclaimed that his hanging would “make the gallows glorious like the cross.’’
The fiery, courageous, monomaniacal Brown - whom Virginia’s governor called “fanatic, vain and garrulous, but firm, and truthful, and intelligent’’ - has attracted fiction writers from Bruce Olds to Russell Banks. Horwitz’s skills are a good match for this enormously compelling character, and his well-paced narrative incorporates masterful sketches of Brown’s family, foot soldiers, financial backers, admirers, and prosecutors. Letters between Dangerfield Newby, a former slave who served with Brown, and his wife, still in bondage in Virginia, lay bare the personal, tender hopes and fears animating Brown’s men. The result is both page-turning and heartbreaking - a book to engage mind and soul.
FIVE CHIEFS:
A Supreme Court Memoir
By John Paul Stevens
Little, Brown, 304 pp., illustrated, $24.99
A Republican nominated by President Gerald Ford in 1975, John Paul Stevens found himself on the Supreme Court’s liberal wing toward the end of his tenure (he retired in 2010). While serving on a court whose right wing included future Chief Justice William Rehnquist as well as legendary liberal William Brennan, as the junior justice Stevens was obliged to go last in explaining his votes. On cases deadlocked at 4-4, noting that “Brennan and Rehnquist were invariably on opposite sides in such cases,’’ he writes that he liked to begin, “I agree with Bill.’’ His temperamental centrism (and dry humor) served him well, both on the court and as a chronicler of his time there.
Stevens begins with an amiable if rushed history of the court’s first dozen chief justices, from the distinguished (John Marshall) to the disgraced (Roger Taney, famous for the appalling Dred Scott decision), then plots his own career course against the five chiefs he worked with as clerk, lawyer, judge, and justice. His tone throughout is exceedingly congenial, and he takes pains to make accessible even complex judicial wranglings. He’s eager to praise both justices from the past as well as his own colleagues, whether for what he feels are overlooked judicial merits (such as Warren Burger’s opinion using the 14th amendment to cover gender equality), or for improvements to the court’s own functioning, such as Chief Justice Melville Fuller’s 1888 innovation that justices should greet each other with a handshake before each day’s session. “That brief greeting,’’ Stevens writes, “confirms not only the personal friendships that all members of the Court share but also the more fundamental point that our common goals outweigh our individual differences.’’ Beneath the surface one detects sadness that our current political environment may have infected even his beloved court; by the end, it’s hard to escape the impression that the book is as much elegy as celebration.
WORLD IN THE BALANCE:
The Historic Quest for an Absolute System of Measurement
By Robert P. Crease
Norton, 317 pp., illustrated, $26.95
“The human body was the first and oldest measuring instrument,’’ writes Robert P. Crease, noting the worldwide use of feet, hands, and other anatomical landmarks to assess and communicate the sizes of things. But as civilizations began requiring more complex measurements for trade, agriculture, and industry, new tools emerged. In this surprisingly entertaining book, Crease, a philosophy professor at Stony Brook University, proves an adept explainer of both physical science and metaphysical dilemmas - such as, do our choices in how and what we measure both reveal and shape what we find important? If, as Crease argues, “[m]easurement, in every culture, has rich symbolic dimensions,’’ then what does it mean that the United States joins only Liberia and Myanmar in rejecting the International System of Units (formerly known as the metric system)?
After examining two distinct local measurement systems (China’s based on flutes and musical tones, West Africa’s on sculptural golden weights), Crease takes us to France, where 18th-century revolutionary fervor, along with longstanding problems with inconsistent, archaic units and standards, sparked a search for a new system that would be simple, clear, and tied to eternal natural sources.
For Enlightenment scientists, Crease writes, this seemed “a clear and achievable goal, and an indispensable element of the rational, egalitarian, and universal society which the revolutionaries aspired to establish.’’ Misfires were common - notably in France, where “decimal fervor’’ resulted in ridiculous, incoherent rules such as “10-hour days, 100-minute hours, 100-second minutes.’’ Once a more reasonable metric system was established near the end of the 18th century, it gradually gained traction throughout Europe and Latin America. In Crease’s telling, the United States’ long resistance to the metric system, despite proponents such as Thomas Jefferson and John Quincy Adams, is a story of stubborn fear of change; cautious, entrenched financial interests; a general mistrust of the French; and the missionary zeal of antimetric crusaders.
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