What could possibly go wrong in a wealthy matriarch’s country home when her dilettante son, his restless wife, and his widowed brother live there together? Strong Passions, set in the vanished world of Edith Wharton’s “Old New York,” recounts the true story of a tumultuous marriage. In 1862, Mary Strong stunned her husband, Peter, by confessing to an affair with his brother. Peter sued Mary for divorce for adultery, but not before she accused him of being unfaithful and kidnapped their child. Social history at its most intimate, Barbara Weisberg portrays a family and country in turmoil as they faced conflicts over women’s changing roles, men’s financial power over wives, and male custody of children. She presents the chaotic courtroom and panoply of witnesses who provided contradictory and often-salacious testimony. Then she asks us to be the jury, deciding each spouse’s guilt and the possibility of a just resolution.

A fascinating story of spirits and conjurors, skeptics and converts in the second half of nineteenth century America viewed through the lives of Kate and Maggie Fox, the sisters whose purported communication with the dead gave rise to the Spiritualism movement - and whose recanting forty years later is still shrouded in mystery.

In March of 1848, Kate and Maggie Fox - sisters aged 11 and 14 - anxiously reported to a neighbor that they had been hearing strange, unidentified sounds in their house. From a sequence of knocks and rattles translated by the young girls as a "voice from beyond," the Modern Spiritualism movement was born.

"Talking to the Dead" follows the fascinating story of the two girls who were catapulted into an odd limelight after communicating with spirits that March night. Within a few years, tens of thousands of Americans were flocking to seances. An international movement followed. Yet thirty years after those first knocks, the sisters shocked the country by denying they had ever contacted spirits. Shortly after, the sisters once again changed their story and reaffirmed their belief in the spirit world. Weisberg traces not only the lives of the Fox sisters and their family (including their mysterious Svengali-like sister Leah) but also the social, religious, economic and political climates that provided the breeding ground for the movement. While this is a thorough, compelling overview of a potent time in US history, it is also an incredible ghost story.

An entertaining read - a story of spirits and conjurors, skeptics and converts - "Talking to the Dead" is full of emotion and surprise. Yet it will also provoke questions that were being asked in the 19thcentury, and are still being asked today - how do we know what we know, and how secure are we in our knowledge?