Menu
Next in the queue
52
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
17/100Critics
87/100Scholars
Author:
Malcolm Gaskill
Publisher:
Knopf
Date:
November 1, 2022
The story of a family tragedy brought about by witch-hunting in Puritan New England that combines history, anthropology, sociology, politics, theology and psychology.
What The Reviewers Say
Gaskill patiently lays out the deterioration of conditions in Springfield, year by year, bad crop by bad crop.
... a brilliant, unforgettable portrait of a small, beleaguered community in New England in the 17th century. People distanced from us by four centuries, and an almost entirely alien world-view, live again as real, flawed, deeply sympathetic human beings.
... powerfully evocative.
We are fortunate that historian Malcolm Gaskill immersed himself in this remarkable and, until now, largely neglected document. Archived at the New York Public Library, it grounds his enthralling book on a 17th-century witch hunt that, in the author’s deft hands, fascinates as much as the more notorious one that gripped Salem decades later..
