I've been reading Pagan and craft books for ten years now, and I have to say this book is user-friendly, engaging, concise, and very much lends to further study (should the reader so choose) due to its exquisite and purposeful scope, notes, structure, clarity, and bibliography--Beginners and more advanced readers can learn from and with it.
Isaac Bonewits' characteristic conscientious, honest, and careful treatment of the topic serves well as a reality check (and he does reality checks and corrections on his own work as well), which will not sit well with everyone, of course. It was important to me that he did not fabricate, has exquisite interpretational skills, and continually researches a wide array of resources thoroughly. This lent very well to his coverage of what was done to witches, their paths, and their reputations over time (both by practitioners and by others) ...for nothing exists in a vacuum, does it (and history was written by whom, usually the "victors")? I would have loved this book to be far more in depth, but then, the book is exactly what the title claims - a concise guide.
I wrote in numerous notes in the page margins-something I do only with my favorite well-thumbed books.
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