A reformative, assenting spin on Salem’s hellfire and brimstone history.
LaPlante (American Jezebel: The Uncommon Life of Anne Hutchinson, the Woman Who Defied the Puritans, 2004, etc.) again plumbs her family lineage to reanimate the life of the only contrite Salem Witch Trial judge to make amends.
As the author’s sixth great-grandfather, Samuel Sewall was one of a number of merciless judges responsible for the executions of Salem women accused of witchcraft in the late 1600s. After emigrating to New England from his Hampshire, England, birthplace, the God-fearing family man and patient, loving father—sadly, a great majority of his children were stillborn—enjoyed societal prominence in his mid-30s as a powerful elected deputy magistrate on the Great and General Court of Massachusetts. Previously abandoning a ministry career, he pursued work in the printing business and then became fascinated with Colony politics. Well versed on Puritan religious protocol, Sewall concurred that “public punishment of a sinner was a public service,” and this belief and many others like it followed suit as he and his fellow magistrates judged the fates of colony members accused of witchcraft in Salem, the largest town on the Colony’s North Shore. LaPlante explains that as the French and Indian War began to erupt in the late 1690s and Sewall’s newborns continued to perish inexplicably, blame for this succession of personal and political unrests fell to an omnipresent “evil” that was believed to have pervaded their township. Hundreds accused of devil worship perished at the hands of the Court, but it was Sewall who, at age 40, looked back with repentance since he’d personally had the blood of more than 20 people on his hands—all condemned with little or no proof of their witchery. Sewall, aging and increasingly liberal-minded, would marry twice more and go on to denounce slavery and advocate equality for women. LaPlante’s insightful account is fortified with descriptions of conservative, puritanical New England and its history (including psalms recited by Sewall), creating a vivid sense of place and context.
A reformative, assenting spin on Salem’s hellfire and brimstone history.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-06-078661-8
Page Count: 336
Publisher: HarperOne
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2007
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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