Very definitely the best book I’ve read in a long time is Killing the Witches by Bill O’Reilly and Martin Dugard.
Whether you liked O’Reilly in his Fox News days or not, this book will hold your attention every page of the way both for its quick action as well as its very thorough research and great presentation. If Mr. Dugard is the researcher for O’Reilly’s book, he’s done an outstanding job. If they’ve written it together, they’re masterful.
The author have written a series of “Killing “ books, including Killing Reagan, Killing Kennedy, Killing the Mob and Killing the Killers, and I’m eager to start on another in the series, most likely Killing the Mob, the story of Lincoln’s last day.
But top of the list is Killing the Witches, the story of Salem, Massachusetts, how religion ad tradition were really behind the Massachusetts’ town’s frightening years in the late 1600s when women who simply acted strange were suspected and hunted down as witches, women who were demonic possessed and should be burned at the stake.
While the book is sensational in tracking down the hysteria of the day and how the very strange affliction of two young girls caused a terror in Salem, it gets even better when it tracks the impact of those few years in later centuries, influencing such greats as Jefferson, Washington and Adams, as well as the Constitution itself.
The book shows how religion helped shape the very birth of the United States and how witch hunts are still the subject of social media. Think Roseann Barr claiming witch hunters destroyed her career, or how JK Rowling took so much heat for promoting traditional and real gender. Think of how teachers and police are charged with crimes that destroy their lives, are highly publicized and ruin their futures, only to be found innocent in the end…a modern day witch hunt.
Killing the Witches is spellbinding,
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