Tomorrow at 7 pm, I will be at the Harvard Book Store to hear Katherine Howe read from The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane
To get a sense of the author’s speaking voice, watch this clip from Good Morning America.
I’d be delighted to get together afterwards with interested readers of this Weblog, perhaps over ice cream at Herrell’s.
More: event page.
[This could be a good book for the Kindle, as the only illustrations are handwriting samples that could be rendered on the Kindle in plain text (perhaps a commenting reader can let us know how the book looks on a Kindle. The hardcover is beautifully designed, produced, and printed.]
Katherine Howe (brilliant) had one disturbing quote in her TV interview… “I hope my [Ph.D] advisor is watching!”.
Personally, I’d always wanted to pursue a PhD, but interviewing “advisors” was a major turn-off. Would this be “my” PhD? Or “My advisors’ version of my PhD?”
The reading was far more interesting than expected. The actual reading from the book occupied only about 10 minutes. The rest of the hour was taken up with a brief background talk and the author answering audience questions. The standing-room-only crowd tossed a lot of esoteric questions at Katherine Howe and her answers were always interesting. One guy asked if she’d read an old Latin manuscript on witchcraft and she said “only in the English translation”. There was a lot of discussion of why witch trials occurred and the author said “It is a lot easier to blame a person than a system.”
I reflected on the fact that the hated King Bush II, who was blamed for all of the U.S.’s troubles, is gone off to a quiet retirement. Yet our troubles continue…
If you’re interested in witch trials, I recommend a book called “Poisons of the Past: Molds, Epidemics, and History” by Mary Kilbourne Matossian. It’s written in thick academic style, but she links the incidence of witch trials to the likelihood of widespread ergot poisoning.
Daniel: Katherine said at the bookstore reading that the ergot theory has been mostly dismissed by scholars. I’m not an expert on the subject, but it doesn’t seem reasonable that a bunch of people being high on drugs would all decide that they needed to scapegoat and kill a bunch of women, most of whom were single or widowed and had small property holdings coveted by others.
Plenty of people take drugs today and the results are random rather than organized.
I’m a third of the way through it on the Kindle, and haven’t run across any handwriting samples. Are they are the end? At any rate, most Kindleized books just use small images (JPEGs) for stuff like that. And if properly formatted you can enlarge images and if they are landscape they autorotate so they display at their maximum size.
The only illustration in the Kindle edition was the triangular charm.
I found the book a bit slow to get going. I was 50 percent through before anything remotely exciting happened (us Kindlers refer to percentages, not pages).
And the book was something of a “chick book,” with long passages where the plot doesn’t advance, but where we hear about relationships with boyfriends, parents, and so on.
Maybe 3 out of 5 stars.