Review by New York Times Review
THE word "party" suggests a manageable unit, something that fits in one or two cars and gets seated at the same restaurant table. The Donner Party consisted of 80-plus people - en route to California when they were trapped in the Sierra Nevada during the winter of 1846-47. For the writer, this presents a challenge. He or she must shift the narrative hither and yon between the original snow-bound emigrants, settled into two dismal camps near Truckee Lake, and the various rescue parties who head off into the mountains and become stranded themselves. The most successful tellings - this one, for instance, and last year's "Desperate Passage," by Ethan Rarick - hang the chronology and events on the framework of a single emigrant's experiences. In "The Indifferent Stars Above," Daniel James Brown has chosen the Illinois newlywed Sarah Graves, ostensibly because of a personal link. His great-uncle, George W. Tucker, also set out west from Illinois in 1846. Though there's no evidence that Sarah and George ever spoke, he "had traveled where she traveled, saw and felt much of what she saw and felt." Not too much, one hopes, for Uncle George's sake. By the end of the saga, Sarah Graves has seen her husband die and, the book suggests, felt her mouth water at the aroma of his heart roasting over the coals of a campfire. ("The smell of roasting meat is largely the same no matter what type of meat," Brown writes.) She has consumed the flesh and organs of a traveling companion, while some of the others, huddled a few feet away, have done the same with her father. She may very well have survived a plot to kill (and, need I mention, eat) her. After reaching safety, she learns that her younger sister survived, in part, by eating their mother and that the family's entire fortune was buried and lost. Because the narrative follows Sarah so closely, I expected the moment when she and the rest of the "snowshoe party" survivors reach civilization to be as emotional as that moment in "Endurance" - Alfred Lansing's incomparable telling of Shackleton's travails - when Sir Ernest appears like a ghost at the door of a whaling station manager on the island of South Georgia, from where he had set out more than a year before. When the man realizes who it is, he is overcome, and it's hard, as a reader, not to feel the same. But Sarah Graves's arrival at Johnson's Ranch is strangely unmoving. We know well the horrid details of her journey, but we don't really know her. We don't know any of them. I cared no more about Sarah Graves than I did about Levinah Murphy or William Eddy or Patrick Breen or George Donner or Margret Reed or her albino servant, Baylis Williams. (Though I maintained a puerile interest in Charles Burger and whether he'd be eaten.) Sarah Graves was 21 when she and her husband joined her family on its way west. It's not Brown's fault, I suspect. Donner Party journal entries are maddeningly terse. The same flinty reserve that kept the emigrants pushing west made their journals as stony and cold as the mountains that undid them. The day the first relief party finally arrives at Truckee Lake, Patrick Breen's diary entry begins with the weather: "Fine & pleasant froze hard last night." He gives brief mention to the 10 men who "arrived this morning from Bear Valley with provisions" - and then gets back to the weather ("Some . . . say the snow will be here until June"). Brown, a historian loath to take liberties with the facts of his narrative and characters, is pushed to conjecture: "And fine and pleasant as well, it must have seemed to Patrick Breen that last night, to be sitting in his cabin with the miracle of fresh-baked bread set before him." The members of the Donner Party were circumspect as well on the topic of cannibalism. When Breen takes note of a fellow emigrant's plans to "commence on Milt & eat him," Breen's reaction, in full, reads: "It is distressing." Whether the cannibals are mum from shame or from Brown's editing, I can't say. One of his goals is to restore dignity to the Donner emigrants, whose courage and decency have, over the years, taken a back seat to their menu. To those who would criticize certain of the party for considering cannibalism only a few days after their food ran out, Brown points out that the pioneers had no understanding of hypothermia and believed the dead had starved, not frozen, and that they were on the fast track to the same fate. Not that the text is wanting for lurid details. I kept interrupting my husband, Ed, to relay the latest Donner dinner horror. "They're toasting their moccasins," I'd say. Ed happened to be reading Calvin Trillin's "Feeding a Yen." "Calvin's eating fish tacos in Barbados," he'd answer. It went on this way for 100 pages. Boiled ox bones. Macaroni pie. Luis's organs! Pain baguette. "The Indifferent Stars Above" is an ideal pairing of talent and material. In "Under a Flaming Sky: The Great Hinckley Firestorm of 1894," Brown showed himself to be a deft and ambitious storyteller, sifting through the copious and often conflicting details of dozens of survivor and eye-witness accounts to forge a trim, surging minute-by-minute narrative. He takes more side trips here with snow than he did with fire. In almost every chapter, he steps away from the events at hand to provide historical or medical context. With a few exceptions, it's engrossing stuff. Brown delves into the primitive morality of feral tribes and the psychology of extreme trauma. He covers birth control and hygiene on the pioneer trail, the latter surely contributing to the former: "They smelled not just of sweat but also of urine and excrement and menstrual blood and yeast infections and halitosis and tooth decay." The science of starvation and of hypothermia is well-traveled terrain, but Brown manages to bring new (to me, anyway) offerings to the table. I knew, for instance, that people throw off their clothes in the final minutes of hypothermia, but hadn't known there was a name for it ("paradoxical undressing") or why it happens (when the body gives up and stops hoarding blood for the vital organs, blood suddenly rushes back into the extremities and skin). Brown isn't a showy writer, and that's probably for the best. With tragedy of this scale, an unadorned telling of the events speaks loudest. Consider the phrase "they loaded their packs with their blankets and what remained of their former companions. . . ." The understatement of simple circumstance delivers the wallop all by itself. After reaching safety, Sarah Graves learns that her younger sister survived, in part, by eating their mother. Mary Roach's most recent book, "Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex," has just been released in paperback.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [October 27, 2009]
Review by Booklist Review
The story of the ill-fated Donner party, a group of nineteenth-century settlers en route to California who became snowbound in the Sierra Nevada mountains and resorted to cannibalism to survive, remains an iconic moment in American history. Given the story's inherent elements of horror and heroism, it is surprising that this account, told from the point of view of a young bride who survived the tragedy, is finally such an uninteresting book. Part of the problem is the author's inability of incorporate his copious background material into the flow of the narrative (readers probably don't need to know about 1840s-era birth-control methods). Even the author's treatment of the tragedy itself, however, feels dully reportorial, without any of the you-are-there drama that Piers Paul Reid brough to Alive!, his account of history's second-most-famous cannibalism-survival story, concerning the famous 1972 airplane crash in the Andes. So why bother with this Donner party treatment when so many other, more compelling works exist? The premise itself sets this book apart, and while it's not handled particularly effectively, it will still interest those fascinated by the subject.--Pitt, David Copyright 2009 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Library Journal Review
In April 1846, as young newlywed Sarah Graves departed her Illinois home on a journey to California, she could not foresee the misery and horror that awaited her. After numerous delays on their difficult westward path, she and her family found themselves dangerously behind schedule as winter loomed, and they decided to join an ill-fated wagon train under the leadership of George Donner. Ending up snowbound and starving in the Sierra Nevada range, the Donner party descended into cannibalism, a well-known and grisly episode of pioneer history. Given a fresh and intriguing telling here thanks to the supple, readable, and well-researched narrative by Brown (former managing editor, Microsoft Corp.; Under a Flaming Sky: The Great Hinckley Firestorm of 1894), Graves's dark tale is engrossing and appalling in equal measure. Never melodramatic or maudlin, Brown's work gracefully balances graphic depictions of extreme privation with humanizing glimpses of the emigrants' everyday hopes and fears. Brown also skillfully weaves relevant historical, cultural, and scientific information into his chronicle, creating a rich and contextualized background. Likely to appeal to true adventure and history fans, who may also like Frank Mullen's The Donner Party Chronicles, this work is strongly recommended for larger public libraries.-Ingrid Levin, Salve Regina Univ. Lib., Newport, RI (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Brown (Under a Flaming Sky: The Great Hinckley Firestorm of 1894, 2006) delivers a skillful, suspenseful study of the Donner Party, narrated from the point of view of a newly married woman. In April 1846, 21-year-old Sarah Graves embarked with her family and new husband, 23-year-old Jay Fosdick, on a wagon-train migration to California from Steuben Township, Ill. Armed with Lansford Warren Hastings's newly published The Emigrants' Guide to Oregon and California, they set out with other families, unaware of how disastrously perilous Hastings's "shortcut" to Californiavia Wyoming to the south end of the Great Salt Lake and then through the impassable Wasatch Mountainswould prove. Burdened by their heavy loads, the parties moved slowly and faced increasingly dire conditions such as parched land, limited water, deteriorating sanitary conditions, Indian raids on their cattle and indecision regarding which way to go. Snow began falling in late October when they reached the cliffs of the Sierra Nevada. Halted at Truckee Lake, those able to walkincluding Graveswere determined to make a pass over the mountains and find help, while the mothers and small children stayed at the lake camp. Starvation, hypothermia and dementia plagued both groups, and at some point the wanderers decided to eat the bodies of the dead, including Graves's father and husband. Some even conspired to kill those still alive, such as the two native Miwok boys who accompanied them. Of the 87 "official members of George Donner's company," 47 died, mostly men. Wading through the many previous accounts of the ill-fated journey, Brown creates a thorough and unique narrative. A moving man-against-nature tragedy that still resonates today. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
