This book, a historical account of the Salem witch trials by an author whose prior work has been highly acclaimed, turned out to be a long-winded and tedious disappointment. Schiff has written for The New Yorker, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and the Boston Globe, among other publications. She was awarded a 2006 Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Schiff has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities and was a Director’s Fellow at the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. The biographies have been published in a host of foreign editions.

All three were New York Times Notable Books the Los Angeles Times Book Review, the Chicago Tribune, and The Economist also named A Great Improvisation a Best Book of the Year. Vladimir Nabokov), winner of the Pulitzer Prize Saint-Exupéry, a Pulitzer Prize finalist and A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of America, winner of the George Washington Book Prize, the Ambassador Award in American Studies, and the Gilbert Chinard Prize of the Institut Français d'Amérique. The Witches is Schiff's riveting account of a seminal episode, a primal American mystery unveiled-in crackling detail and lyrical prose-by one of our most acclaimed historians. In an era of religious provocations, crowdsourcing, and invisible enemies, this enthralling story makes more sense than ever. Schiff brings early American anxieties to the fore to align them brilliantly with our own. She illuminates the demands of a rigorous faith, the vulnerability of settlements adrift from the mother country, perched-at a politically tumultuous time-on the edge of what a visitor termed a 'remote, rocky, barren, bushy, wild-woody wilderness.' With devastating clarity, the textures and tension of colonial life emerge hidden patterns subtly, startlingly detach themselves from the darkness. Drawing masterfully on the archives, Stacy Schiff introduces us to the strains on a Puritan adolescent's life and to the authorities whose delicate agendas were at risk. Along with suffrage and Prohibition, the Salem witch trials represent one of the few moments when women played the central role in American history. Speaking loudly and emphatically, adolescent girls stood at the center of the crisis. It ended less than a year later, but not before nineteen men and women had been hanged and an elderly man crushed to death. Neighbors accused neighbors, husbands accused wives, parents and children one another.

It spread quickly, confounding the most educated men and prominent politicians in the colony. The panic began early in 1692, over an exceptionally raw Massachusetts winter, when a minister's niece began to writhe and roar. Pulitzer Prize winner Stacy Schiff, author of the #1 bestseller Cleopatra, provides an electrifying, fresh view of the Salem witch trials.

The witches salem 1692 a history