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The Witches: Salem, 1692
The Witches: Salem, 1692
Stacy Schiff | 2015 | History & Politics
7
7.8 (5 Ratings)
Book Rating
Well researched (0 more)
No map of the village (1 more)
The footnotes, so many footnotes
Some interesting points made, but...
Narrative history that sometimes misses deeper analysis of why it happened. It seems well researched, using the accounts of the period. I don't generally have an issue with footnotes, but I think the author overuses them sometimes, and many of the footnotes could be incorporated into the text or dropped entirely as they sometimes go off at a tanget. Not always a fan of her writing, it's quite wandering and tries to mix an accesible history style with more of an academic writing style. It doesn't really give the reader a great sense of the period atmosphere and concentrates very heavily on what happened at the trials. She was apparently deliberately avoiding explainations, however she attempts to explain the instigators' "hysteria" that originally prompted the accusations of witchcraft; that the symptoms occured in the parsonage, the most repressive environment. The accusations gained the "victims" attention and a respite from chores. I was surprised that there was no map of the village.
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TR
The Romance of Tristan and Iseult
8
8.0 (1 Ratings)
Book Rating
This was an interesting classic Romantic story. The Romance of Tristan and Iseult is incredibly sad but also telling of how the ideas of courtly love were perceived in that time period.

I really enjoyed getting a glimpse into the stories of that period and how people acted about the different ways to love people. There is the adulterous courtly love, the romantic marital love, and the brotherly and loyal love. Each of these loves are explored in this story, which makes it that much more interesting to read.

I learned in one of my classes that this story was the bedrock to a lot of the stories we know and love today. Romeo and Juliet can even trace its lineage to this story. Shakespeare and a lot of the other writers during his era drew a lot of inspiration from this story, so it was very cool to be able to see where they all came from.

I would recommend reading this if you are interested in reading Romantic/Medieval stories. It is one that is obviously well known.
  
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Awix (3310 KP) rated The Trollenberg Terror (1958) in Movies

Jun 22, 2019 (Updated Jun 22, 2019)  
The Trollenberg Terror (1958)
The Trollenberg Terror (1958)
1958 | Horror, Sci-Fi
6
5.8 (4 Ratings)
Movie Rating
Independent sci-fi movie has the inevitable hokeyness of films of its period but shows flashes of intelligence, until the climax at least. Vaguely Lovecraftian alien creatures take up residence atop a Swiss mountain, rip the heads off passing mountaineers, turn other people into zombies to eliminate nosey psychics, and so on. Fearing the world supply of cuckoo clocks, cheese with holes in it, and multi-purpose knives may be in peril, a group of assorted boffins attempt to sort things out.

Well, at least it's original, if not always in the best of ways. Things proceed in a relatively effective way until the aliens decide to come down the mountain and attack in person, at which point they are revealed to be tentacled monocular blobs entirely beyond the budget of the film to convincingly realise. The same could be said of many alien invasion and monster movies of the 50s and 60s and this is neither the best nor the worst example of the genre from that period.
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