The Witches: Salem, 1692

Narrative history that sometimes misses deeper analysis of why it happened. It seems well researched, using the accounts of the period. I don't generally have an issue with footnotes, but I think the author overuses them sometimes, and many of the footnotes could be incorporated into the text or dropped entirely as they sometimes go off at a tanget. Not always a fan of her writing, it's quite wandering and tries to mix an accesible history style with more of an academic writing style. It doesn't really give the reader a great sense of the period atmosphere and concentrates very heavily on what happened at the trials. She was apparently deliberately avoiding explainations, however she attempts to explain the instigators' “hysteria” that originally prompted the accusations of witchcraft; that the symptoms occured in the parsonage, the most repressive environment. The accusations gained the “victims” attention and a respite from chores. I was surprised that there was no map of the village.

Ok, maybe two stars. But I'm only on the planet so long.

While a pile of research went into it, it reads more like fiction; imputing various thoughts in the heads of people without any real proof, endless narrative of this happened then that happened, and then he or she said x, y, or z.

Meanwhile the important questions of the subject are breezily dismissed. Rather than a real examination of the human condition, we get dismissals of irrational hysteria and superstition that essentially say, “well, who among us hasn't had an irrational thought?”

Deep questions of extreme religious doctrine, prep-rational (i.e. Pre Enlightenment) society, repression of women, isolation, mob hysteria, individuality, human rights, and more go totally unexamined, or at least absent from the first 100 pages, at which point I put the book away.

Any intelligent and thoughtful society should demand a better work. This is more antiquarianism than history, bubble gum for the eyeballs, a waste of the reader's time.

Ugh.