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Old Man Metal

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The Witches - Stacy Schiff
Back Bay Books/Little, Brown and Company
496 pp.

Stacy Schiff's 2015 release The Witches is a thoroughly-researched, thoroughly end-noted (57 pages of them) non-ficton study of the New England witch panic of the early 1690s and the witchcraft trials that followed, with the main focus being on the town of Salem, Massachusetts.

Schiff begins by setting the scene, introducing the individuals and families involved in the coming paroxym of fear and rigid justice, as well as the town itself, setting all within well-explored historical and relational contexts. She spends a good bit of time on the rocky political and social history of the fledgling colony, as well as providing a solid understanding of the Puritans and their faith, and the ramifications of both for their collective character and psycology. This is time well-spent, as both are contributors to what happened and, more importantly, primary determinants of how it happened.

When the witchery begins, Schiff has to tell a complex story, and her sources are centuries-old observations made from numerous, quite varied viewpoints. This telling could quickly become cumbersome; Schiff avoids this difficulty by presenting a straightforward, unified narrative of events that reads with the smoothness of fiction; if interested, the reader can delve into sourcing and attributions in the endnotes. The pacing, writing and subject matter combine to maintain the reader's interest in what could be dry history in the wrong hands.

Schiff's coverage of the trials is an excellent example of this approach. Actual records are fragmentary and biased by the recorders, and the scenes themselves were emotionally-charged and, at times, chaotic; the result is a disjointed collection of multivariate impressions, which Schiff works into a smooth, connected narrative. Her recounting of the trials was particularly revealing to me; I had no idea that the victms of witchcraft played such an active role in the prosecutions, providing "spectral evidence" of the witches' guilt via the "touch test" and the torment that they suffered with every glance and gesture of the defendants. As elsewhere, Schiff sets the trials in a proper legal/historical context, examining Colonial law and its evolution from British law, all without being pedantic.

The "action," so to speak, is followed by a solid, multi-level look at the aftermath of the witch panic and trials, exploring their far-reaching, and in some cases devastating, effects on individuals, families, the town of Salem, and Colonial society as a whole, both short-term and long-term.

Schiff closes with an explanation of sorts; she does not examine the various theories propounded by others, nor does she advance a theory of her own; rather, she shows how the unique intersection of aberrant psychology, the Puritan mindset, adolescent angst and the intense collective stresses of the time, place and season could combine to produce the evidence of witchcraft and confessions thereof (and indeed had done so in the past), and how factors specific to that point in the history of Salem caused this belief that some among them were witches— in and of itself nothing new for the Puritans— to explode into a brief firestorm of accusations, imprisonments and executions.

The pains to which Schiff goes to provide the proper context for the events that she recounts make this a valuable read if you want to understand why they happened, and her writing style and approach to the subject matter combine to make it an enjoyable read as well. Recommended.

Order here.
 
Cool, heard the author on coast to coast. I always hated book reports and literature class. Just wanted to read and enjoy - not analyze.
You or morbid should start doing historical crimes occasionally.
I found this page and in particular this documentary about Skidmore MO.
Good movie based on the story starring Brian Dennehe as the town bully called "In Broad Daylight " also free on YouTube
 
Funny thing, I do a lot of beer reviews, which come very easily, and I write the periodic blurb about an album (I would not call them reviews), which is a bit more like pulling teeth. Since I just finished the book, I decided that I would see if I could write a blurb about it, expecting it to be even more like pulling teeth, and to end in me abandoning a paragraph (at best) of hard-won text over my inability to complete the task (I was never a book-report guy either).

Imagine my surprise when I wrote the above, which I think is a better-than-passable review and much more meaningful to a potential reader than my album "reviews," with zero notes, zero initial thought and a minimum of flipping back through the book, in about 45 minutes, including editing and cleanup. Some of my true crime writeups take longer than that, and they basically write themselves- it is a very smooth, natural process most times.

So, potentially more book reviews to come from me in the future, where I didn't even expect to complete the one.
 
I found book reviews to be insanely harder than a normal dead baby/chopped off penis/domestic violence write up. Mostly because when I finish a book, I'm either "HOLY SHIT THAT WAS THE BEST BOOK EVER IN THE HISTORY OF BOOKS OH MY GOD" or "Meh" or "For the love of all that is unfucking holy, can I pleeeeease have the three days I wasted on that book back." I rarely have any more input than that.

Kudos, OMM.
 
I definitely don't have it down as am suppose to be doing book reviews and don't want too blurt too much out as the books usually haven't even been released yet. This subject and period I have some pretty solid ideas about and usually steer clear of in movies and books. I think this was one they tried to get me to read and refused. I personally feel his situation like others similar was obsessive sexual repressions which bring about times of the most sexual perversion [like Victorian] that can be associated with any fundamentalist group, adolescence gone amuck, atypical jealously and vindictiveness and greed of position or possessions [the later probably minisule unlike the Spanish Inquisition] that created false scenarios and psychotropic qualities created with grains that had molded that added to the mass hysteria. Throughout times people have loved to fall into mass hysteria wanting the chance to rip people apart [usually innocent] that are different or can't defend themselves. I doubt anyone there was actually practicing anything more that folk magic and herbalism if that but the "children" in question were rebelling by attempting to call down more on themselves.
 
I've heard the "ergot of rye" theory before; Schiff doesn't discuss it at any length. There's a brief mention at one point, I think.

I've no doubt that the psychological and sociological factors you mention were largely at the root of what happened. That was Schiff's position as well.
 
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