Three histories, with varying degrees of success

History can be a difficult subject because the present so quickly becomes the past and the future is always just out of reach. On audio, history becomes a spoken medium, evoking the oldest of oral traditions in relaying the momentous occasions of a culture or a society.

"Midnight Rising" by Tony Horowitz (Macmillan Audio, nine CDs, $39.99) is an excellent example of how galvanizing history can be. Almost everyone is familiar with the historical footnote of John Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry, Va., in October 1859. It proved the precursor of a larger conflict that would erupt the next year in the form of our country's only civil war.

Brown, a man who resembled and thought of himself as an Old Testament prophet, had a harebrained scheme of liberating slaves and hiding them in mountain fortresses that he would build through the Alleghany and Blue Ridge mountains. If he provided inspiration, weapons and an escape route, he genuinely believed he could provoke a widespread uprising that would swing the tide against slavery.

The folly of his mission proved dear indeed. Several of Brown's sons were killed or wounded in his battles with pro-slavery forces in Kansas and Virginia, and Brown was hanged for treason, murder and insurrection. Horowitz, thanks to the superb narration of Daniel Oreskes, makes Brown's plotting suspenseful and symbolic, given that we know the outcome of these events. He also documents the reasons why Brown was turned into an abolitionist saint by Northerners, particularly a group of Boston merchants known as the Secret Six who financed — poorly, it should be added — Brown's suicidal mission.

"Midnight Rising" is history at its best: Riveting in its tension, specific in its detail and entertaining in the twists and turns that real events employ. The same historical perspective does not exist in "SEAL Target Geronimo: The Inside Story of the Mission to Kill Osama Bin Laden" by Chuck Pfarrer (Macmillan Audio, eight CDs, $29.99).

If there's anyone who understands the mindset of the Navy SEAL team, it's Pfarrer, a former assault-element commander of SEAL Team Six, the legendary operatives who carried out the Bin Laden hit.

But Pfarrer is not the historian that Horowitz is, and it shows. Although there is some suspense and tension leading up to the Bin Laden raid, especially when one of the two helicopters crashed and had to be destroyed, far too much of Pfarrer's narrative feels like it's in military code, with innumerable acronyms and nicknames dropped like breadcrumbs.

The best part of "SEAL Target Geronimo" is the raid, which Pfarrer recounts in excruciating detail. What's more impressive than the account is the work of the Navy SEAL veterans who knew exactly what to do and how to do it.

Finally, there is personal history. In "Unmeasured Strength" (Macmillan Audio, six CDs, $29.99), Lauren Manning, speaking in a curiously dispassionate and slightly breathless voice, recounts her heroic fight back from being burned over 80 percent of her body in the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001. Manning was a well-trained corporate raider working for Cantor Fitzgerald. She was caught in the fiery downdraft exploding out of the elevator of one of the Twin Towers.

From that harrowing narrative at the beginning, Manning backs up to tell us of her New England upbringing with highly privileged yet disciplined and driven parents, to which she credits her recovery. Childhood and marriage No. 1, marriage No. 2 and fertility treatments to have her first son are summarily dispensed with in early chapters, and the remaining segments detail her physical battle, also a psychological struggle, never to feel as if the terrorists won over her scarred, ridged and immobile body.

Manning faced a decade of surgery after surgery after surgery. Luckily, if one could call it that, her face was not as scarred, and eventually she managed to struggle back to a semblance of normalcy. Along the way, she also forced the issue to try to have a second child, failing fertility treatments with a body that had seen enough, she had her genetic child through a "donor womb." After all this, we may admire Manning, but we don't particularly like her. She still seems too entitled, too determined to have it all, the same traits that made her successful on Wall Street. But these traits are probably what got her through this nightmare.