The Witches: Salem, 1692 -- How A Society Can Go Mad, Then and Now

Photo: from google.com/books, at this address.

Incredibly thorough, this book seems somehow meticulous and yet all over the place at the same time. I mean that in a good way, though I could maybe understand those reviews I've read that appreciated that less than I did. I'm a guy whose thoughts are kinda all over the place anyway, yet I somehow manage to reel it all in and be very productive on most days (not lately, with a long-lasting sinus infection and head cold combination happening), and hopefully averagely productive on my worst.

This book is like that: it tells the whole Salem story, from every possible viewpoint, in a very omniscient POV that considers the victims, the accusers, the judges, the politicians who let it all happen, the social milieu, and the background history--often all in the same page or two. It never spins out of control, though a few times it may look like it's about to. It's written in a cyclone fashion, its winds reaching far, and like that storm it pulls it all together memorably.

And memorable this is. Its author, Stacy Schiff--a Pulitzer-Prize winner--clearly intended this to read like it does. It's almost Umberto Eco-like, except he really does spin out of control, especially after The Name of the Rose. And those who don't enjoy his ride will find his latest novels impossible to read. (I can read The Name of the Rose straight through, but it's mentally taxing, and his other books are just taxing, like James Joyce at his most internal.) Anyway, Schiff writes here in that whirlwind fashion, yet even the all-encompassing winds have everything under a microscope.

So though it's far-reaching, it's still concise and very readable. Its short asides or tangents exist to show the human side of the hysteria and tragedy. One passage, about a teenage girl, tracked down at her grandmother's house in another town, is chased by men with sticks and dogs. She gets away for awhile, but what must that have been like? Schiff offers the image, and imagines how it felt.

That's what I really took away from this. You get the facts, as you would expect to. You may know, for example, that Arthur Miller's The Crucible strayed a bit from the cold truth. John Proctor, for example, was not anything like Daniel Day-Lewis, even with bad teeth. In history, he was a plain-talking tavern owner in his 60s. He did not have a battle with his conscience; a great percentage of those who hanged did so pleading their ignorance for the entirety of their captivity. Those who "confessed" never saw jail time to begin with--except for one, who did hang anyway. That was George Burroughs, the town's former minister, and an extremely strong man who survived Indian massacres in Maine--and who was apparently despised for that, close and afar. His hanging is perhaps the book's, and Salem's, biggest mystery.

But you get the personal sides and the surrounding history. Indian attacks were common and a constant fear--to the point of hysteria. If that wasn't bad enough, you had catastrophic winters, rampant disease, socio-economic chasms (lots of homeless women and indentured servants, who were routinely raped and/or beaten), extreme gender bias (being an outspoken woman was not wise), a stifling belief system, and a theocracy that epitomizes the necessity for the Separation of Church and State that this country even now so often ignores and forgets.

You get it all. Because don't you want to understand why it happened? This is Nazism in a microcosm, right here in New England. In short, at first, if you were different, you were screwed. If you were a social undesirable, you were accused. Then, if you were in a position of economic power, like Rebecca Nurse and her family, you were accused. Predictably, it didn't stop until family members of the judges and politicians (especially Governor Phip's wife) were accused. How can Harvard-educated men, the wisest and the smartest in the country, take part in this, and allow it to happen? Well, here's how.

And it can happen again. Just take a town (or a country?) at social war with itself, and throw it a bone, and watch it all happen. There were dissenters, sure--until they were immediately accused and thrown in jail. That, predictably, shut them up real fast. The threat of that then quickly shut up potential dissenters, until finally nobody (besides a few untouchables in Boston, so close yet so far away) spoke up. It doesn't take much of an imagination to see this happening on a large scale.

Let's just hope it doesn't.

But here is how a community can go mad. And it's not from any one thing, but from a perfect storm of the worst elements of human nature: religious fundamentalism, ignorance, intolerance, e theocratic government, greed, jealousy, a male-dominated society, a conviction of belief over intelligence and common sense--even from the most educated men of their time. In a world where belief trumps knowledge (See what I did there?), where disinformation and misinformation is gospel, where belief in what you can't prove trumps what can be proven (I did it again.)--Well, how can disaster and chaos NOT happen?

The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane by Katherine Howe

photo: First edition hardcover, from its Wikipedia page


Very well-researched and captivating book about witches and healing, past and present.  The author wisely switches back and forth between the two, sometimes focusing more on one than the other, to create the feeling that the past influences the present, especially amongst families.  The author also manages to write about present-day witchery without the muddlesome, and mostly inaccurate, hocus-pocus that goes with it, making it seem more like Wicca than anything like the witches with broomsticks and dressed in black, such as those found in what we think of Salem or The Wizard of Oz.  This book's witches seem more like herbalists than spell-casters, and their witchery is always used for good.

The characters always seem real, especially the Danes of the past, and Connie of the present.  The author also manages to create real minor characters, which is no easy feat.  My favorites were Connie's mother and the elitist researcher who points Connie to Harvard's Rare Books and Manuscripts Collection.  His lines were priceless; I actually read them again out loud.  I have to admit that the antagonist is not much of a mystery.  You feel like knocking Connie upside the head for constantly being oblivious to the adversary's obvious meddling.  And it's obvious to me that the author has seen The Silence of the Lambs.  A character in that movie shares the exact same name, mannerisms and speech-patterns, and oily-slick aura and presentation, as his namesake in this book.

Perhaps the most impressive part of this book for me was its writing.  Sometimes it got a bit purple; in some passages, the author is trying way too hard.  But most of it is really good writing.  I was blown away by some small touches, such as how in one scene, Connie and Sam are talking, and we leave them, follow the dog for a couple of sentences as it walks away from them, then re-join them as the dog does, thereby showing the passage of a short amount of time.  Clever, without shocking us out of our suspension of disbelief.  There are a lot of small passages in there like that, and the writing is simply good, and exact, without bogging the reader down with so much specificity that it stops the story's progress. 

The reader does need to be interested in the mid- to late-1600s to enjoy the book, however; a healthy knowledge of The Crucible also helps, as part of the interest is to see what the author will do with the characters of that play, as well as the other real-life personages.  Overall, she remains true to them and to history, and so creates a captivating book that plops you more into the past than it does into the present--well, into the early 1990s, anyway.  I also guess that the book was placed in the early 1990s--rather than in 2009, when the book was actually published--because of the numerous scenes in which Connie talks to her mother on an actual phone.  I also suspect that too much present-day technology would be too jarring for us, especially since we want the author to return to the 1690s scenes, anyway.