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History. Nonfiction. HTML:Six Women of Salem is the first work to use the lives of a select number of representative women as a microcosm to illuminate the larger crisis of the Salem witch trials. By the end of the trials, beyond the twenty who were executed and the five who perished in prison, 207 individuals had been accused, 74 had been ??afflicted,? 32 had officially accused their fellow neighbors, and 255 ordinary people had been inexorably drawn into that ruinous and murderous vortex, and this doesn??t include the religious, judicial, and governmental leaders. All this adds up to what the Rev. Cotton Mather called ??a desolation of names.? The individuals involved are too often reduced to stock characters and stereotypes when accuracy is sacrificed to indignation. And although the flood of names and detail in the history of an extraordinary event like the Salem witch trials can swamp the individual lives involved, individuals still deserve to be remembered and, in remembering specific lives, modern readers can benefit from such historical intimacy. By examining the lives of six specific women, Marilynne Roach shows readers what it was like to be present throughout this horrific time and how it was impossible to live throug… (more)
User reviews
This book is a non- fiction account of six
The first part of the book is a little dry with a lot of dates and geneology which could be very interesting for hardcore history enthusiast. For those who would rather just get to the juicy parts, you really could skip over part one and start on part two . From that point on the story flows much easier and is very interesting. I have always found this period of time fascinating and I keep my eyes peeled for books that are reputable and well researched that deal with this topic. It is very clear this author wanted to move away from the Hollywood themes and did an incredible amount of research. I don't know if I have read an account like this one before. So much focus is on the girls making the accusations, the reasons why they made them, and the absolute hysteria that followed, that the trials only get a cursory glance, so I found the book educational and revealing.
It is hard for many of us to read history books that are written in this manner. I wonder if the author added the brief fictional stories in an effort to off set the classroom history type format the rest of the book contained. It can get a little dull at times and it has taken me a while to get through this one. I just put it down and read something else for day or so and then picked this one back up. I'm glad I was allowed access to this book via Netgalley and I do wish more books written on this subject had less of the "Crucible" type focus and placed more emphasis on this type of material. This is such a strange time in our history and it's still so shocking. I would like to say we learned something from The Salem Witch Trials, but sadly it seems history has repeated itself in one form or another in this same way.
This one is a 4 star rating.
I loved that there were bits of fiction mixed in with