'John Brown, Abolitionist': A Soldier in the Army of the Lord

By BARBARA EHRENREICH

THIS may not be the most auspicious time for a sympathetic biography of a religious fanatic who repeatedly sought to advance his cause through violence. Even before the war on terrorism, John Brown had been largely relegated to a loony sidebar of American history. The high school history textbooks that the sociologist James Loewen surveyed in 1995 either brushed Brown off or labeled him insane, while, at a loftier level of intellectual discourse, Michael Ignatieff accused him of ''sadistic self-righteousness.'' So it takes courage, if not a touch of Brownian madness, to argue, as David S. Reynolds does in his absorbing new biography, ''John Brown, Abolitionist,'' that Brown was not the Unabomber of his time, but a reasonable man, well connected to his era's intellectual currents and a salutary force for change.