A Pulitzer Prize-winner for her biography Véra, the story of Nabokov’s wife, Stacy Schiff also wrote a bestselling life of Cleopatra and the Pulitzer-nominated Saint-Exupéry. Her study of Franklin and the early years of the nation made her a respected American historian, and in her new book she unravels the madness of The Witches: Salem 1692 (Little, Brown, $32). Schiff’s fastidious research into the notorious witch trials animates the motivations and actions of all involved, making what happened seem simultaneously bizarre and believable. Schiff’s description of how a few young women could start a movement that spread throughout the Massachusetts colony and that eventually led to the execution of twenty people is part history lesson, part thriller, and part Kafka. The Witches shows how blind faith, fear, jealousy, power, and repression combined to create a pathological environment in which no one’s life was safe from the subversive power of a fainting girl.
