The Questioning Librarian

John Brown, Abolitionist: The Man Who Killed Slavery, Sparked the Civil War and Seeded Civil Rights  by David S. Reynolds (Vintage, 2006) What to do with John Brown? Any historian or student of history interested in the Civil War or the lead-up to one of the greatest calamities in U.S. history must grapple with that same question. Or, perhaps, to re-frame the question, how does one explain the enigma of John Brown, this walking contradiction, a man who somehow managed to be both ahead of his time and behind the times, a militant abolitionist politically, a tolerant Calvinist religiously, a man who believed in the true equality of blacks and whites in a time when even the most progressive white abolitionists still embodied the racist sentiments prevalent in that period. In his magisterial biography of John Brown, the abolitionist who became infamous for the murders he oversaw in the fight over "Bleeding Kansas" and for his attack on Harpers Ferry, David Reynolds seeks t...

It is a curious feature of the human mind that when confronted with evidence of a reality that contradicts our beliefs, we are often quick to reject this evidence. This confirmation bias--our tendency to uncritically accept evidence which bolsters our own views while rejecting immediately evidence which contradicts it--has been understood as a fact of our thought-processes for some time, and it goes a long way towards explaining why we hold doggedly to fixed beliefs in spite of evidence to the contrary.  This may well be the case with a book that I've recently finished, David Owen's radical piece of environmental thought,  Green Metropolis . So what if I say to you that the environmental movement has had it all wrong on a number of very important points? As someone who has been concerned about the state of the environment for some years, I was quite unsettled by much of what Owen had to say.  The main point of the book may be summed up as follows: while the e...