The idea of providing historical precedents for contemporary civil liberties violations is certainly not unique, but there are few titles that possess the rigorous scholarship and analysis required for such an undertaking.

While retired civil servant Robert Rapley’s heart is certainly in the right place, his historic survey of witch hunts from the hysteria of the Middle Ages to the post-9/11 age is an awkwardly written volume whose potential is never fully realized. Witch Hunts suffers from an incoherent structure and sometimes reads like an unedited journal, with each mishmash of quotations followed by the author’s very repetitive thoughts. The narrative style often strays into the melodramatic tone of a grade-school film-strip.

Rapley has certainly done a lot of research, and it is always worth recounting the horrors of the European witch hunts, the Dreyfus Affair, the Scottsboro Boys, the Salem trials, and a variety of similar miscarriages of justice. However, the lack of a consistent style and a firm editorial hand leaves us with a tome that sometimes reads like a self-help book on how to recognize signs of an impending witch hunt and avoid getting trapped by one.

Rapley remarkably concludes, despite his own evidence, that post-9/11 targeting of Muslims, while disturbing, does not qualify as a real witch hunt. Curiously, Rapley has also chosen not to explore some of the most significant North American witch hunts of the 20th century, from internment camps for citizens of Japanese heritage to the McCarthy hearings.

Witch Hunt devotes a full chapter to the U.S. Patriot Act and other instruments of Bush-era repression, an area already well covered elsewhere, but ignores similar legislation passed by Ottawa. You’d think that this critical, yet largely unmined, area would be of more interest to readers anxious about how such historical precedents are playing themselves out north of the 49th parallel.