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The Unredeemed Captive: A Family Story from Early America. By John Demos. (New York: Knopf, 1994. xvi, 316 pp. $25.00, ISBN 0-334-55782-4.)
"Most of all," John Demos announces in the opening sentence, "I wanted to write a story." And what better topic for a colonial historian than the story of the star-crossed Williams family of eighteenth-century Deerfield, Massachusetts. Its human scope stretches well beyond a single family, its geographical sweep vastly exceeds a single town, and its cultural context is broader by far than Puritan New England.
The first part of the book narrates the sudden Indian attack of 1704, the brutal deaths of Rev. John Williams's wife and two youngest children, the survivors' arduous trek to Canada, the eventual repatriation of Williams and...