Just like in his book Midnight in the garden of good and evil John Berendt gives us an impression of a city and its population. This time he picked Venice.
In 1996 the Fenice, opera house of Venice, is burnt to the ground. Berendt hears of this and sets his sails to Italy. In Venice he speaks with people who heard and saw the Fenice in flames and he is very intruiged with their stories. Who set the Fenice on fire and why does it take almost ten years to get the opera house built again?

These questions however are not the main concern is this book. The book consists of various (personal) stories told by the people of Venice. And John Berendt is a master in putting them on paper.

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A play about the Salem witch-hunt of 1692. We get to see what happens in communal hysteria when the daughter of reverend Parris comes back from dancing in the woods very ill. It is said that she and the other girls were met by the devil. After that everybody is accusing everybody for having something to do with the devil and witchcraft, all for different reasons. One for example is Rebecca Nurse who is a midwife and has delivered only dead babies at a family. Reason: she must be in contact with the devil.
All the accused have two options: confess, be released and return to God or not confess, keep your dignity and own truth and be hanged.

Miller makes it very clear what happens when people make each other crazy and the (too big a) role the church and religion play in it. His writing leaves no mistake, the play is well written, but sometimes I was lost. I think that was, because of the subject that doesn’t really appeal to me, the number of characters, too much at some points and the fact that it is the story of a little American town in the 17th century. What I did like is the fact that the situation described can be paralleled with all the other incidents when communal hysteria hits the history of human kind. Everyone can think of numerous times, although we try to forget them.

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If you are not a big fan of nonfiction — like me — don’t be alarmed by the genre description. It reads like fiction: thriller, drama, wit, you’ll get all and at very high quality at that. You will read like there is no tomorrow. It is a great book!

A New York journalist is staying in Savannah, when one of the many colorful people of the town is charged with murder. At first we get some chapters, each concentrating on a colorful resident. I thought, especially with the chapter about Chablis, that they were nice to read, but stood outside the real story and didn’t contribute to it, but actually that isn’t really necessary. They just add up to a great couple of years in which the journalist lives in “the South”. Then follow the chapters with a full report of the trial, the ending and of all the people involved, which are most of the people of the town one way or another.

Every time when reading I had to remind myself I was reading nonfiction, that the people really exist and that the things happening have actually happened in real life. Some things I considered too weird to be true, but hey, the world is a strange place, especially a remarkable town called Savannah.

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