A finely crafted consideration of responsibility within a familiar historical tale.
A judge who presided at the Salem witch trials comes to repent of his role.
Although leavened with wit, British novelist and historian Francis’ fictionalization of Samuel Sewall’s predicament is a cerebral, scrupulous, often abstract story. Thirty-eight-year-old Sewall—not only a judge, but “a Council member, merchant, private banker, householder and family man”—is a soul striving for decency in a challenging era. The Puritan community in Boston in the late 17th century, bounded by ocean on one side and wilderness on the other, faced many threats, including the distant but powerful control of the British king, the French, the Indians, attacks, and massacres. As the novel opens, Sewall’s involvement in the trial of seven pirates leads him to regret that he may have compromised his principles and shown weakness. And then reports begin of witchcraft and spectral visitations in Salem. Francis, who previously wrote a respected biography of Sewall (Judge Sewall’s Apology: The Salem Witch Trials and the Forming of the American Conscience, 2005, etc.), seems magnetized by the perpetual dilemmas of morality, grace, and faith as embodied in an honest man, hampered by “fear of authority, or at least the desire to placate those in power,” now confronted by a rapidly spreading contagion of either devilry or lying children. As the trials begin and then the hangings, and the spate of accusations gathers pace, the community begins to grow uneasy and ultimately hostile to the judges and their methods. Meanwhile, Sewall continues his relentless self-questioning. Francis’ measured narration allows the suffering, piety, and tragic delusions of events to emerge with clarity. Sewall is both perpetrator and witness and, eventually—through his expressions of atonement—a voice of conscience.
A finely crafted consideration of responsibility within a familiar historical tale.Pub Date: Oct. 4, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-60945-351-0
Page Count: 326
Publisher: Europa Editions
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2016
These letters from some important executive Down Below, to one of the junior devils here on earth, whose job is to corrupt mortals, are witty and written in a breezy style seldom found in religious literature. The author quotes Luther, who said: "The best way to drive out the devil, if he will not yield to texts of Scripture, is to jeer and flout him, for he cannot bear scorn." This the author does most successfully, for by presenting some of our modern and not-so-modern beliefs as emanating from the devil's headquarters, he succeeds in making his reader feel like an ass for ever having believed in such ideas. This kind of presentation gives the author a tremendous advantage over the reader, however, for the more timid reader may feel a sense of guilt after putting down this book. It is a clever book, and for the clever reader, rather than the too-earnest soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1942
ISBN: 0060652934
Page Count: 53
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1943
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s...
The acclaimed author of The Underground Railroad (2016) follows up with a leaner, meaner saga of Deep South captivity set in the mid-20th century and fraught with horrors more chilling for being based on true-life atrocities.
Elwood Curtis is a law-abiding, teenage paragon of rectitude, an avid reader of encyclopedias and after-school worker diligently overcoming hardships that come from being abandoned by his parents and growing up black and poor in segregated Tallahassee, Florida. It’s the early 1960s, and Elwood can feel changes coming every time he listens to an LP of his hero Martin Luther King Jr. sermonizing about breaking down racial barriers. But while hitchhiking to his first day of classes at a nearby black college, Elwood accepts a ride in what turns out to be a stolen car and is sentenced to the Nickel Academy, a juvenile reformatory that looks somewhat like the campus he’d almost attended but turns out to be a monstrously racist institution whose students, white and black alike, are brutally beaten, sexually abused, and used by the school’s two-faced officials to steal food and supplies. At first, Elwood thinks he can work his way past the arbitrary punishments and sadistic treatment (“I am stuck here, but I’ll make the best of it…and I’ll make it brief”). He befriends another black inmate, a street-wise kid he knows only as Turner, who has a different take on withstanding Nickel: “The key to in here is the same as surviving out there—you got to see how people act, and then you got to figure out how to get around them like an obstacle course.” And if you defy them, Turner warns, you’ll get taken “out back” and are never seen or heard from again. Both Elwood’s idealism and Turner’s cynicism entwine into an alliance that compels drastic action—and a shared destiny. There's something a tad more melodramatic in this book's conception (and resolution) than one expects from Whitehead, giving it a drugstore-paperback glossiness that enhances its blunt-edged impact.
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s novel displays its author’s facility with violent imagery and his skill at weaving narrative strands into an ingenious if disquieting whole.Pub Date: July 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-53707-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2019
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