SOURCE: Kazin, Alfred. “God's Own Terrorist.” New York Review of Books 45, no. 6 (9 April 1998): 8-9.

In the following review, Kazin faults Banks's weak characterizations in Cloudsplitter but contends that Banks “is a talented and agile novelist who moves easily from one American subject to another.”

On a rainy Sunday night, October 16, 1859, seventeen men led by the violently religious abolitionist John Brown, who thought slavery a greater sin than murder and regarded himself as “an instrument in God's hands” for extirpating it, took over the United States arsenal at Harpers Ferry in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. There the Potomac and Shenandoah meet.

“In the moment of their junction,” Jefferson wrote in Notes on Virginia (1785), “they rush together against the mountain, render it asunder, and pass off to the sea.” He called the passage of the Potomac through the Blue Ridge “one of the most stupendous scenes in nature...