Blazes new trails into Salem’s well-explored history.
The author of Founding Mothers and Fathers (1996) evaluates a less edifying episode in early American history—the infamous 1692 witchcraft scare—and finds connections between the terrors of American’s Second Indian War and the colonial authorities’ endorsement of the trials.
Instead of writing another history of the oft-chronicled crisis, Norton (American History/Cornell Univ.) looks at the notoriously flawed and unfair trails from a 17th-century perspective. She quickly uncovers a number of historical threads not previously explored by scholars. Most prominently, Norton argues that massacres of colonists by the fearsome Wabanakis tribe during the Second Indian War and the colonial government’s failure to effectively counter such killings were the main precipitators of the witchcraft trials. According to the author, the contemporary Puritan worldview insisted that the military failures of such notable officials as chief judge William Stroughton and Sir William Phips indicated God’s displeasure with the New England colonies. Furthermore, Norton reveals, many of the Salem accusers had suffered personal losses at the hands of brutal Wabanakis. In her analysis of spiraling war fears and spiritual hysteria, the author contends that the state’s leaders were all too willing to believe allegations of witchcraft, which they convinced themselves was evidence of Satan’s rather than their own incompetence. Norton, a feminist scholar, blames the Massachusetts governor, councils, and judges for the executions of innocent Salem “witches.” Her fascinating new take on the crisis has particular relevance in our own era, when rumors of war and resurgent religious fervor again create a volatile cultural mix.
Blazes new trails into Salem’s well-explored history.Pub Date: Oct. 8, 2002
ISBN: 0-375-40709-X
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
As a career civil servant with Britain’s Ministry of Defence, Pope served a three-year stint in the early 1990s as chief investigator of UFO sightings in the United Kingdom. He began as a skeptic and ended up a true believer. This book, a bestseller in Britain, attempts to explain his conversion but does a poor job of it. Fully a third of the book is spent discussing what is by now a familiar litany of UFO-related phenomena: Roswell, Area 51, the US Air Force “Blue Book” of UFO investigations, etc. Pope’s own work consisted mainly of investigating alleged sightings of UFOs, crop circles (huge, symmetrical designs mysteriously created in open fields), and cattle slaughters (aliens apparently like hamburgers). Slim as this investigative work is, and even though, as he himself admits, there is no proof of the existence of UFOs, Pope still insists that “there is a war going on” with aliens. To make matters worse, he contends, we aren’t even aware that this war is happening. He also assures us that 95 percent of UFO sightings go unreported, though his only evidence for this is that private UFO groups have said so. Still, the book is blessedly free of the paranoia found in so much of the UFO writing done in the US. For Pope, the government of Britain is not engaged in a conspiracy to cover up the existence of UFOs (as some believe about the US government); it just hasn’t bothered to do much investigating. He can also be lyrical, such as when describing the joy and wonder of visitors within a crop circle. But he can also turn around and be facile and trite. On the connection between aliens and ghosts he concludes, “The spirit world is highly complicated.” One would suppose this to be true. An odd, unconvincing statement of belief from a government official. (8 pages b&w photos)
Pub Date: Jan. 27, 1999
ISBN: 0-87951-916-9
Page Count: 270
Publisher: Overlook
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1998
A fascinating meditation on delusion and desire, this is an American tale.
Thomas Pynchon meets Hunter S. Thompson (stylistically) in a novelistic account of the US government's secret air base known as "Area 51."
Area 51 is a chunk of desert in the southwest the size of Belgium. Beside it lies a nuclear testing site. Both are products of the Cold War, when it was believed air power and nuclear power would combine to keep America safe. Area 51 is a secret place, it exists on no maps. It came into being so aircraft, like the U-2, that could spy on the Soviet Union and China might be tested and perfected. It's so secret that it is in effect a black hole that draws to it the paranoid, conspiracy buffs, the just plain loony. There are the "youfers" who search for, and find, UFOs flying above Area 51; there are the "black-plane watchers" who search for ultra- top-secret aircraft. This is the world Patton (Made in the USA, 1992; Open Road, 1986) takes us into. He travels beyond the physical location of Area 51 to the psychic location of those who must believe that in the sky exists a world we are not meant to know. He travels to Roswell, N.M., the birthplace of UFO conspiracy theories, to conventions of alien abductees, to a bar in the desert called the Little A 'Le' Inn, where sky watchers share their stories. Why do they believe what they believe, "see" what they "see"? Patton ponders the Jungian notion that flying saucers are "symbolical rumors." Or perhaps in a Cold War world that, as he writes, would "routinize Doomsday... bureaucratize Armageddon" (and this world is not long gone), it takes mystery and the unexplained to give us a sense of common humanity. Patton allows us to question who is loony and who is not.
A fascinating meditation on delusion and desire, this is an American tale.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-679-45651-1
Page Count: -
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1998
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