[I got books on the brain so this week I’m going to mention a few that I’ve read recently.]

I thought I knew the John Brown story. You know the basics: Bloody Kansas, whacked people with broadswords, schmoozed with New England intelligentsia, thought he could liberate the slaves of the South by raiding Harpers Ferry. He was on the right side of history but was a wild man with a Unabomber streak. Frederick Douglass listened to his pitch and said, basically: You’re crazy.

But now I have to revise my estimation of John Brown, thanks to a new book, “Midnight Rising,” by my friend Tony Horwitz. (I’m not a neutral critic, but click here to see that other reviewers are raving about the book.) You know Tony from ”Confederates in the Attic” and many other historical books that double as modern-day travelogues. This time Tony made a strategic narrative decision to stick to the 19th century, without the flash-forwards to the present day. Good call: The historical material is so compelling on its own.

“Midnight Rising” takes the caricature of John Brown and turns it into a complex and largely sympathetic portrait. He endured unbelievable tragedy — the deaths of many children — and repeated failures as a businessman. One constant in his life, for decades, was his abhorrence of slavery. He brooked no compromise. He wasn’t a reformist, he was a revolutionary. And he was hardly a lone wolf: He organized a team of raiders that included African Americans as well as several of his sons. Each raider had his own (mostly tragic) story. They all believed in the justness of their cause and showed great courage, even as they had doubts about the tactical genius of their leader (he seemed to think that the ideal place to fight would be somewhere low, surrounding by high ground).

The raid failed, of course, and by many measures was a fiasco. Brown went to the gallows along with many of his comrades. But he found his voice after his capture and, in interviews and in court, struck powerful rhetorical blows against an evil institution. He proved to be prophet. The sins of this guilty land will be purged in blood, he said in his final written statement. And he sure got that right.