![]() ![]() Neighbor turned on neighbor, daughter fingered mother. ![]() The youngest victim was just 5, the oldest 79. Many more were accused and acquitted, their property confiscated, their lives effectively ruined. In a single year, 14 women, five men and, yes, two dogs, were executed for the crime of witchcraft. It is, she writes, “our national nightmare, the undercooked, overripe tabloid episode, the dystopian chapter in our past … America’s tiny reign of terror.” Though the Salem story has been told many times, Schiff’s splendidly written account brings it thrillingly to life. As a historian, she has examined Benjamin Franklin’s diplomacy and, now with “The Witches,” the mysterious events that shook the Massachusetts Bay Colony to its foundations. As a biographer, she has chronicled the lives of Véra Nabokov (thus winning a Pulitzer Prize), Saint-Exupéry and, more recently, Cleopatra. ![]() Stacy Schiff, one of our most versatile and nimble writers, boldly ventures into disparate centuries and milieus to bring back tales that illuminate and instruct. ![]()
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