Book Summary and Reviews of Killing the Witches by Bill O'Reilly

Killing the Witches by Bill O'Reilly

Killing the Witches

The Horror of Salem, Massachusetts (Bill O'Reilly's Killing Series)

by Bill O'Reilly

  • Published:
  • Sep 2023, 304 pages
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About this book

Book Summary

The instant New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Publishers Weekly bestseller!

Killing the Witches revisits one of the most frightening and inexplicable episodes in American history: the events of 1692 and 1693 in Salem Village, Massachusetts. What began as a mysterious affliction of two young girls who suffered violent fits and exhibited strange behavior soon spread to other young women. Rumors of demonic possession and witchcraft consumed Salem. Soon three women were arrested under suspicion of being witches--but as the hysteria spread, more than 200 people were accused. Thirty were found guilty, twenty were executed, and others died in jail or their lives were ruined.

Killing the Witches tells the dramatic history of how the Puritan tradition and the power of early American ministers shaped the origins of the United States, influencing the founding fathers, the American Revolution, and even the Constitutional Convention. The repercussions of Salem continue to the present day, notably in the real-life story behind The Exorcist and in contemporary "witch hunts" driven by social media. The result is a compulsively readable book about good, evil, community panic, and how fear can overwhelm fact and reason.

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Reviews

Media Reviews

"A near-perfect read about hysteria, cancel culture, and the history of religious freedom... The authors allow the facts to rattle, provoke, and horrify the reader." —Front Page Magazine

This information about Killing the Witches was first featured in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.

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Author Information

Bill O'Reilly

Bill O'Reilly is a trailblazing TV journalist who has experienced unprecedented success on cable news and in writing eighteen national number-one bestselling nonfiction books. There are more than eighteen million books in the Killing series in print. He lives on Long Island.

Martin Dugard is the New York Times bestselling author of several books of history, among them the Killing series, Into Africa, and Taking Paris. He and his wife live in Southern California.

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Read-Alikes

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