When preteens attack!

Sometimes I forget how I heard about certain books and why they made it onto my TRL (To Read List) but a lot of the time I just see a blurb about a book somewhere and it peaks my interest. That's what happened with The Witches: Salem, 1692 by Stacy Schiff. As the title suggests, it's about the witch trials that occurred in Salem during the year of 1692. I've actually visited Salem and read up a bit on the subject but Schiff covered the start of the accusations through to the far-reaching consequences of the trials into present day. She touched on the justice system, political climate of the Americas (Massachusetts specifically), and the cultural/religious climate of the area. The belief in witches was nothing new or novel to the people of Salem. At this point, there had been other cases of witchcraft that resulted in trials, convictions, and deaths in others parts of the world. However, the volume of accused which ballooned in the year 1692 and the paranoia that gripped the people of Salem was so extreme that we're still talking about it today. What I found most intriguing about the book was the aspect of gender roles and how that most likely played a leading role in the affair. Preteen girls and women were the primary accusers (and women the accused). This group had no voice in society and yet they were able to completely blind the rest of the community into believing that they saw visions, wrestled with specters, and signed pacts with the devil. They pointed fingers at innocent people and everyone stopped and listened to them. Why was this? Why did their opinions suddenly matter? Why were much of the women accused on the fringes of society? There are a lot of questions which we may never have the answer to because documentation is sparse (much was lost or intentionally altered). We can only theorize and rationalize to the best of our ability. The occult and the manifestation of it on people is so fascinating to me. I really enjoyed this book (the bibliography is AWESOME). If you're as curious about this topic as I am and you want to look at it from a variety of angles then I recommend you give The Witches: Salem, 1692 a shot.

Footnotes: A love story.

You realize that you're a nerd when you get excited for a book with footnotes. The probably with this particular book was that the footnotes were actually endnotes which meant a lot of page flipping which I found tedious and annoying. I have to say though that this minor inconvenience was the only issue that I had with Blood Work. As you know already, I'm a huge fan of scientific nonfiction and this definitely fit the bill (with a side of history and murder to make it even better!). Learning about the history of something (blood transfusion) which I've never given much thought about was more engrossing than I had originally anticipated. Tucker made great use of resources to paint a vivid picture of Parisian life (specifically among scientists and academics) in the 17th century. The conditions of the time which included religious bias and political favor (or disfavor) effected any advances that were being attempted by the scientific community. In fact, because of the events which unfolded in this story there was no experimentation whatsoever regarding blood transfusion for over 150 years. It was essentially a dead end that no one dared to attempt (or even cared to attempt). For anyone who's interested in either history or science this book will be ideal for you (and it's a quick read!).

I'm trying to get to my backlog of books which range from earlier this year to many years ago that I haven't gotten around to quite yet. Next up on the "to read" list is The Land of Laughs by Jonathan Carroll. According to a well-known author, "The Land of Laughs is a book for anyone who has ever believed that a favorite book could be a safe place to go when things get hard." When a book has a blurb from Neil Gaiman you know it's going to be a good one. From the title, you'd think that this was a book full of comedy. However, it's actually the story of two people who go on a quest to write a biography of their favorite children's author which leads them on a frightening journey of discovery AND self-discovery. Just because you wish you could immerse yourself in your favorite storybook world from your childhood doesn't mean you'd really jump at the chance to do that if you could. Imagine the frights which would greet you there!