The Witches is
a book as sensitive to the practicalities and banalities of the
colonies as the grander intellectual and religious forces that conspired
to propel one of America’s earliest, most memorable and vicious
ordeals. Like all historical traumas, the Salem trials linger in the
imagination because they seem like nothing less than the structural
collapse of the whole project of humanity; a failure of civilization
itself.
The evil that men do has a way of diabolically disguising itself
in the trappings and suits of logic, reason and civility. But, in the
end, such twisted, toxic rationales jury-rigged to justify barbarism,
cruelty and the highest forms of inhumanity amount to just so much
proverbial duck-weighing.