21 of 21 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Magnificient!, May 9, 2009
This review is from: The Indifferent Stars Above: The Harrowing Saga of a Donner Party Bride (Hardcover)
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This history of the (in)famous Donner party alternately reads like a thriller, a horror story, a nature study and pure poetry. Author Daniel James Brown really did his homework, actually tracing the route taken by a young woman named Sarah Graves Fosdick as she trekked across the American West with her new husband, seeking a homestead in California.
Taken in by an opportunist named Lansford Hastings, who wanted to make a name for himself (not to mention some quick cash) by routing Westward-heading emigrants through what he called his "shortcut," the several families of the Donner party made a fateful decision to heed Hastings' advice and follow his unproven route through the Sierra Nevada mountains. This was, as history shows, their undoing, as they became stranded throughout the winter in 20+ feet of snow, with no food and minimal shelter.
After several failed attempts, Sarah Graves and some of her companions managed to escape through what is now called the Donner Pass, but not until many members of the party had died and the survivors had been reduced to cannibalizing the bodies of their relatives and friends.
Brown relates the whole story, beginning with the departure of Sarah and her family from their home in Illinois through her death at the age of 46 in what is now known as California's Napa Valley. In doing so, he writes with sensitivity and compassion, inviting readers to imagine both Sarah's joy during the first half of her journey and the deep grief she must have felt throughout the remainder of her life once she finally reached California. At no point does Brown stoop to judging the people whose story he relates, nor does he sugar-coat the events of their tragic situation. Thus, some portions of the book are difficult to read, but for me the revulsion I occasionally felt was worth the reward of coming to a better understanding of the grit and heroism displayed by our ancestors who crossed the continent at a time when life on the road often meant living the equivalent of a stone age existence.
I admire the fact that Brown himself visited places along Sarah's route, walking through chest-high prairie grass (loaded with ticks), climbing a "slope" in the Wasatch Mountains (7,500 feet above sea level) and slogging a mile across Utah's salt flats ("My God, I thought, those people were tough!")
Brown writes beautifully and portions of the book read like poetry. Take, for example, this passage -- "To really understand [Sarah's] story, I knew I would have to travel farther than just the sixteen hundred miles that lay between me and California. I would have to travel into the heart of a girl who was a product of a vanished world...a girl who encountered in her life challenges more daunting and tragedies more profound than I have ever begun to confront in my own."
And that is, for me, exactly what Brown has managed to do in The Indifferent Stars Above. Read this book.
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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Misses its mark, January 11, 2010
This review is from: The Indifferent Stars Above: The Harrowing Saga of a Donner Party Bride (Hardcover)
I was taught in graduate school that the first criterion for reviewing a book is to measure the author's success in meeting his stated aim. On that basis, I have to give this book no more than three stars, and that high only because it is well-researched and detailed.
The stated premise is what should have separated this book from many others about the Donner expedition, an account of that tragedy through the eyes of one of the survivors. But it never achieves that. The voice and the viewpoint are entirely the author's. Sarah Graves is perhaps more prominently mentioned than some of the other characters, but when incidents occur through the course of the narrative, we learn of them through the author, not through Sarah Graves. We occasionally get an idea of what Sarah might have thought about an incident, but it's entirely the author's idea of what she might have thought.
There is no doubt that the author put a great deal of effort into researching the book, and he generally treats the subject matter with sensitivity, not sensation, as one might expect from the grand-nephew of one of the survivors. The writing is good, though it swings back and forth between straightforward reportage and attempts at lyrical imagery in setting the scenes in which the Donner Party tragedy took place.
The photos in the middle are a bonus and help to bring the characters to life. The absence of a map, however, is a bit disappointing. Books on topics involving journeys should always have maps!
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Everything you need to know and more, July 16, 2009
This review is from: The Indifferent Stars Above: The Harrowing Saga of a Donner Party Bride (Hardcover)
This is a very well researched book on the Donner Party horror. While reading it, I kept remembering an old English teacher or two who taught that you should research all that you can about a topic so you can answer any question, but never put everything you learned into your paper. In this case, your book. So many scattered details take away from this account. The author has done so much research, I am sure he uncovered every detail about Sarah Graves there is to uncover. He used the extra facts he uncovered to fill out her story to make a 300 page plus book.
If you want a more detailed and moving story of the Donnor Party, I would recommend "Desperate Passage" by Ethan Rarick. If you are interested in learning about other topics connected to the Donner Part saga, you can find all the references you need in this well document book by Daniel James Brown.
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