2024 the best movies in 2000 review

Price: $6.78
(as of Nov 25, 2024 00:12:18 UTC - Details)

With the vision of a historian and the voice of a novelist, prize?winning author John Demos explores the social, cultural, and psychological roots of the scourge that is witch-hunting, both in the remote past and today. The Enemy Within chronicles the most prominent witch-hunts of the Western world?women and men who were targeted by suspicious neighbors and accused of committing horrific crimes by supernatural means?and shows how the fear of witchcraft has fueled recurrent cycles of accusation, persecution, and purging. A unique and fascinating book, it illumines the dark side of communities driven to rid themselves of perceived evil, no matter what the human cost.

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Viking Books; First Edition (October 2, 2008)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 318 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0670019992
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0670019991
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 0.035 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.5 x 1.25 x 9.25 inches
Reviewer: moira
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title: good product
Review: This is a very interesting book. It puts witchcraft in a sociological/psychological context. I couldn't help noticing the subtle parallels to today's war on women.

Reviewer: A. Carman
Rating: 4.0 out of 5 stars
Title: Worth the effort
Review: John Demos sets out to discover commonalities between history's greatest witch hunts. He notes that from Salem to the fake Satanic panics of the 80s they all involve conspiratorial thinking, overwhelmingly target women, are manipulated by the justice system and pretend to be about saving the children. It's dense and involved but anyone interested in the history of injustice will find it worth their time.

Reviewer: R. E. HAYES
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title: Are we still witchhunting?
Review: Easy-to-read survey by a scholar who has spent his career in deep research on the subject. He draws some parallels between ancient and modern witchhunting -- useful reminders that we are not so different from our ancestors in our fears and scape-goating. Excellent references for further reading.

Reviewer: Amazon Customer
Rating: 3.0 out of 5 stars
Title: A dark chapter in human history
Review: The book deals primarily with the witchhunting in Europe during the middle ages and the equivalent in the American north-east. All in all an interesting book but at times a bit repetetive. Because of the title "2000 years of witch-hunting" I expected the book to cover more extensively also the ideological counterparts in contemporary society. Demos talks briefly about the "witch-hunt" against freemasons and other groups in the 18th and 19th century and also about the best-known example of our time: the "red scare". But all in all it feels tucked on. I wish he would have dealt with the contemporary "witch-hunts" more thoroughly.

Reviewer: Inga Thornell
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title: Five Stars
Review: excellent! both an analysis of witchcraft trials and a resource guide cataloguing the other work in the field.

Reviewer: smit
Rating: 4.0 out of 5 stars
Title: Four Stars
Review: daughters school book

Reviewer: Margaret M. Devilbiss
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title: Five Stars
Review: Very interesting read.

Reviewer: Rob Hardy
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title: It Wasn't Just in Salem
Review: Everyone knows about the witchcraft trials in Salem, Massachusetts. Few people know as much about them as John Demos, a professor of history who has written academic texts on the theme and about early American history. Demos explains that after writing _Entertaining Satan_ in 1982, he thought he had said his last about the history of witchcraft. "Yet the talk-show invitations kept coming each year at Halloween; there was still the occasional witchcraft conference to attend; there were even middle-of-the-night phone calls from people who thought themselves possessed by the Devil." So when he was invited to write a synthesis of the subject, he had reasons to take on the project, although he had been used to writing about specific cases from centuries ago, and doing so for an academic audience. _The Enemy Within: 2,000 Years of Witch-Hunting in the Western World_ (Viking) is the result, and while it inevitably covers the witch scare in New England, the longer view has to do with the larger pattern of blaming and scapegoating. People have done this for centuries, and although we might congratulate ourselves for graduating from the magical, supernatural thinking that brought forth the Salem trials, we are still demonizing. Demos's chapters are a set of historic essays on important themes, and his broad outlook on the subject is well-reasoned and fascinating.Christianity developed a tolerance, even a complicity, to witch-magic. Sorcerers, usually women, might be despised or condemned, but they were also respected and consulted especially to work a bit of counter-magic against some curse large or small. Spells and charms were thought effective in battling against a mystifying world, and the church had similar remedies. Christians, for instance, used sacred relics to promote cures or they valued charms such as medallions made from paschal candles. By the end of the fourteenth century, the disarray from wars and plague, an increased emphasis on Satan as a foil to Christ, and inquisitorial investigations with the acceptance of torture to gain evidence all brought increased attention to witches. Demos devotes a chapter to the famous _Malleus Maleficarum_, first published in 1486, a guide to what witches do and how to catch them out. Pope Innocent VIII himself supported the book, which showed it was heresy not to believe in witches and their connection to the Devil, listed the leading forms of witchcraft and what witches did, and advised how to get evidence against them, including torturing them to get the truth. Demos summarizes the famous events at Salem, with a specific chapter on one of the chief participants, Cotton Mather. The Puritan minister was preoccupied with witches partly because they fitted into his vision of the imminent millennium and return of Christ, and he encouraged the Salem prosecutions. As society began to doubt the wisdom of the witch trials, so Mather lessened his emphasis on the scourge, but for him, to stop believing in witches would have been to stop believing in God, for the beliefs were closely linked. He even came to reconsider the trials years later, after they had hung their victims, and to regret what had happened and the errors that had been made. Unlike some others involved, however, he made no apology.We don't persecute witches anymore like Mather wanted to, but in his final section, Demos shows that the persecution continues. It isn't for nothing that McCarthyism is called witch-hunting. The analogy was most sharply drawn in Arthur Miller's drama _The Crucible_ in 1952; Miller had researched the historic Salem trials before writing his play, which Demos commends for its accuracy in the depiction of the atmosphere of that time, and for enhancing the power of the term witch-hunting. Demos points out analogies (and differences) in the witch-hunting of other forms and other eras, like the anti-Masonry scares, the persecution of the Bavarian Illuminati, and others. A final chapter shows witch-hunting in a scary modern form, the child care sex-abuse crisis of only the past couple of decades. Accused of Satanism and crimes against children, operators of the Fells Acres Day School, for instance, were convicted and sentenced to up to forty years of prison, serving some years before the sentences were overturned. Demos cites day-care stories of rituals, a prosecutorial compulsion for punitive retribution, coercive or suggestive questioning of children, and a refusal to accept victims' denials as the same sort of processes involved at Salem. The ancient witch enemy is with us still.

Reviewer: DaisyC
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title:
Review: A very informative study encompassing psychological and social forces that created an explosive situation resulting in the destruction of innocent people. The use made of the legal system of that time by the accusers to vent their anger at a perceived loss, hurt or possible danger to the community was a travesty of justice. The book shows the weakness of society and the readiness of people to blame others for their own faults and mishaps regardless of the possible consequences for the accused and, indeed, to say that it is an underlying need for the particular community to return to the status quo is again an attempt to excuse the individuals for their own lack of ability to control their own enemy within-human failings.An excellent book.