The Witches: Salem, 1692

Ok, maybe two stars. But I'm only on the planet so long.

While a pile of research went into it, it reads more like fiction; imputing various thoughts in the heads of people without any real proof, endless narrative of this happened then that happened, and then he or she said x, y, or z.

Meanwhile the important questions of the subject are breezily dismissed. Rather than a real examination of the human condition, we get dismissals of irrational hysteria and superstition that essentially say, “well, who among us hasn't had an irrational thought?”

Deep questions of extreme religious doctrine, prep-rational (i.e. Pre Enlightenment) society, repression of women, isolation, mob hysteria, individuality, human rights, and more go totally unexamined, or at least absent from the first 100 pages, at which point I put the book away.

Any intelligent and thoughtful society should demand a better work. This is more antiquarianism than history, bubble gum for the eyeballs, a waste of the reader's time.

Ugh.