Donner dinner party Issue 3. Issue 3.

IN HIS GREAT poem "Don't Cry, Darling, It's Blood All Right," Ogden Nash skewers the notion that children want to read books that are comforting and sweet: "Hard-boiled, sophisticated adults like me and you/May enjoy ourselves thoroughly with 'Little Women' and 'Winnie-the-Pooh,'/But innocent infants these titles from their reading course eliminate/As soon as they discover that it was honey and nuts and mashed potatoes instead of human flesh that Winnie-the-Pooh and Little Women ate." Published in the 1951 collection "Parents Keep Out," Nash's poem might as well be discussing the 21st-century child: tastes haven't changed so much as they have diversified. Once children had to sate their bloodthirsty natures with fiction; now the trend in nonfiction is to bring them history at its most dire. This season, Don Brown and Nathan Hale use impressive artistry to recount two of the American West's most infamous tragedies in graphic-novel form. And yes, little children, there will be blood. In the more serious of the two, "The Great American Dust Bowl," Brown uses pen, ink and then a whole ocean's worth of digital brown paint to explain how America's heartland became, in the 1930s, a vast barren plain. Brown eschews easy answers and instead offers readers a variety of causes including the destruction of the bison, a farming boom followed by a postwar drop in wheat prices, drought, the Depression and, finally, dust itself. Beaten-down farm folk populate Brown's pages, describing their experiences during the Dust Bowl years. "It made the awfulest noise, that dirt did." Brown provides meticulous credits for these quotations in the book's source notes, but leaves the speakers nameless and, in his minimalist drawing style, almost faceless. Freezing winters, boiling summers and bugs "so thick and so bad that you could swipe handfuls of them off the table and still have more" made the farmers' everyday lives virtually unbearable. By the time Brown describes people suffocating to death in the dust storms, readers are staggering under the sheer weight of relentless human misery. Yet while Brown's narrative focuses on extreme woes, there's something curiously undramatic about his illustrations. It's as if he wants to rein in the atrocious elements of his story even as he brings them to light. You come to wonder if his reluctance to heighten the action with more exciting pictures is part of a refusal to sensationalize. Even a farmer running to escape a black cloud, who recalls thinking "it was the last day of the world," wears an expression of mild distress, as if he had a bit of a cramp in his side rather than the gut-wrenching fear of an approaching storm said to contain enough static electricity to power New York City. "Donner Dinner Party" is, as it boasts, "dire and disgusting, but a testament to the human will to survive." The book is the third in a series with an inherently ridiculous - though entertaining - premise. Nathan Hale (the historical figure, a spy during the Revolution) has been given the gift of seeing America's future. While waiting to be hanged, he tells tales to his hangman and the British provost marshal in order to postpone his inevitable death. The two previous "Hazardous Tales" - "One Dead Spy" and "Big Bad Ironclad!" - were set during the Revolutionary and Civil Wars. Hale now moves on to the tragedy of the Donner Party, a group of emigrants who left Illinois for California in 1846 and were forced to spend the winter in the Sierra Nevada, where about half of them died and some are said to have resorted to cannibalism in order to survive. For those readers who assumed the horrors of the Donner Party began and ended with the conspicuous consumption of human flesh, the spate of attacks, murders and other tragedies along the way will come as a surprise. One notable aspect of this book - aside from the graphic-novel format - is how Hale tackles the actual eating of people. It's clear that to the hangman (a childlike figure who is a perfect stand-in for young readers), the prospect of eating pets to stay alive is more unnerving than the idea of eating people. You can eat 65-year-old Jacob Donner, sure, but don't you dare take a nibble out of Towser the pup ! The end of the book yields fascinating facts, including a grid showing who died, who survived, the causes of their deaths and whether or not they were cannibalized. There's also a flow chart tracking how likely you, the reader, would be to survive the trip based on your age, sex and the size of your family. Because Hale's books are full of imagined dialogue, they can't be strictly categorized as nonfiction, but there's clearly plenty of research behind them. He addresses this question directly in a section called "Correction Baby." ("If you've got questions, comments or corrections, she's got answers !") As to whether James Reed, one of the emigrant party, was as wacky as he is depicted in the book, Hale says, "I think our portrayal of Reed is cartoony, but fair." It's probably safe to assume that holds for most of the history here. Of the two graphic novels, Brown's is clearly more dedicated to using strictly sourced facts to weave an accurate historical narrative. Hale, on the other hand, is happy to jump back and forth in time, using the characters of Hale the spy, the hangman and the provost marshal to keep things lively. And while Brown does his best, most children will probably prefer Hale's blood-soaked adventures over Brown's careful and grim account of an environmental catastrophe. Nash knew this, writing with prescience: "Therefore I say unto you, all you poets who are so crazy about meek and mild little children and their angelic air,/If you are sincere and really want to please them, why just go out and get yourselves devoured by a bear." How likely would you be to survive the Donner Party, based on your age, sex and the size of your family? BETSY BIRD is a librarian and the author of the picture book "Giant Dance Party." She is a co-author of "Wild Things! : Acts of Mischief in Children's Literature," to be published in April 2014.