During the bleak winter of 1692 in the rigid Puritan community of Salem Village, Massachusetts, a group of young girls began experiencing violent fits, allegedly tormented by Satan and the witches who worshipped him. From your girls’ preliminary denouncing of an Indian slave, the accusations shortly multiplied. In less than two years, nineteen women and men were hanged, one was pressed to death, and over a hundred others were imprisoned and impoverished.

This evenhanded and now-classic history illuminates the horrifying episode with visceral clarity, from the opportunistic Putnam clan, who fanned the crisis to fulfill personal vendettas and greed, to four-year-old ‘witch’ Dorcas Good, who was chained to a dank prison wall in darkness till she went mad. By putting the distant amount of the Salem witch studies in the larger context of more sophisticated eruptions of mass hysteria and intolerance, the writer has created a work as thought-provoking since it is emotionally effective.