Witchcraft Legacy: Stories from the Big Attic

by Richard Warren Brewster

Overview

2022 Next Generation Indie Book Awards Finalist

The legacy of the 1692 Salem witch trials looms large in the American imagination; for some, that legacy is especially personal.

When, as children, Richard Brewster and his brother found a steamer trunk in their attic filled with old family books and papers, they unearthed an ancient book once owned by William Stoughton, the chief judge of the trials. In crabbed, handwritten flyleaf notes, Stoughton described someone being mercilessly haunted and perhaps tortured by "Evil Spirits." To the boys, the Evil Spirits seemed to cast a family curse, long buried in the trunk.

Witchcraft Legacy is a remarkable personal and family memoir in which Brewster tells true stories of love, death-including murder-and life's surprising turns as he traces the history of Stoughton's book and the curse of its Evil Spirits. With tales spanning four centuries, as the book passed from hand to hand over the generations, Brewster speaks to the reader in a voice that intimately conveys the universal human experience behind every story.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780991352081
Publisher:	Richard Brewster Author
Publication date:	09/28/2021
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	198
File size:	4 MB

About the Author

Richard Warren Brewster is a mediator and lawyer in New York City. He received his B.A. in the Classics from Princeton and his law degree from Harvard Law School.

Table of Contents

Preface

Chapter 1. Sam and I Find the Witchcraft Judge's Books (c. 1951)

Chapter 2. The Chicken Murders - A Story of Providence and Provenance (1650-1799)

Chapter 3. Rebecca, Freeman, and the Parker Girls (1799-1899)

Chapter 4. The Art Student (1860-1936)

Chapter 5. War Babies (1939-1945)

Chapter 6. The Beach (c. 1949)

Chapter 7. Life on the Gold Coast (1950s and '60s)

Chapter 8. The Gramps I Knew (1941-1955)

Chapter 9. Flashback - The Shootout That Made Gramps an Orphan (1897)

Chapter 10. Bay of Pigs on Bicycles (1956)

Chapter 11. Getting to Know Omy (1960-1969)

Chapter 12. My .300 H&H Magnum (1963)

Chapter 13. Adventure with the Jack of All Trades (1971)

Chapter 14. Mom Talks about Things Like the Pillow Fight (1989-2001)

Chapter 15. Isabel the Third (1932-2002)

Chapter 16. Sam Vanishes over the Horizon Again (1971-2017)

Chapter 17. The Circle (now and future)

Acknowledgments

Appendix: Pages from books belonging to the witchcraft judge

Bibliography

Editorial Reviews

05/02/2022

The demons released in Brewster’s mesmerizing memoir aren’t supernatural, but the manifestations of buried tragedies and unacknowledged trauma across an American family’s history. From the burgeoning backwaters of 17th century New England to the rural exclusivity of Long Island’s Gold Coast, Brewster traces his family history back over four centuries, one that’s defined by the luxury of connections, money, and memory flowing from generation to generation. A sharp-eyed chronicler of American privilege, he focuses on the cost of accumulated wealth and stoic WASP reserve, and explores the complex nature of distant relatives as well as his nearest and dearest–and some shocking events from his own past.

This strikingly original book’s starting point is a grabber: Brewster’s childhood discovery in an attic of books owned by William Stoughton, chief judge of the infamous witchcraft trials in Salem, Massachusetts, and an early benefactor of Harvard, where author Brewster later attended law school. How had they come to be there? In the present of Witchcraft Legacy, the now-septuagenarian author sets out to solve the mysteries of history unearthed by his 10-year-old self, digging through dusty steamer trunks at the family compound in Glen Cove, New York. Jumping around the family tree branches, he reveals long-hidden secrets, debunking legends like that of his great-grandfather, who wasn’t killed in a heroic shoot-out, but left his family and was murdered over water rights.

Facing the past with tenderness and strength in brisk, intricate prose touched with grace, Brewster finds solace in the tough, resolute women who anchored their loved ones during the worst storms. He creates vivid portraits of women whose ambitions were subsumed into family life but, like his formidable paternal grandmother (who enshrined family history and prosperity in the Glen Cove mansion), redirected their intelligence and resolve. A historical memoir of the ruling class, Witchcraft Legacy reveals the foundations of stolid lives, and shows how American myth-making can obscure the hard, vital truth.

Takeaway: Filtering American history through a prosperous family’s hidden struggles, this memoir and family history reveals jolting truths.

Great for fans of: Sarah Wildman’s Paper Love, Buzzy Jackson’s Shaking the Family Tree.

Production grades Cover: B+ Design and typography: A Illustrations: N/A Editing: A Marketing copy: B

BookLife Reviews