The Indifferent Stars Above: The Harrowing Saga of a Donner Party Bride
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In April of 1846, Sarah Graves was twenty-one and in like with a young man who played the violin. But she was torn. Her mother, father, and eight siblings were about to disappear over the western horizon forever, bound for California. Sarah could not bear to see them go out of her life, and so days before the plotted departure she married the young man with the violin, and the two of them threw their lot in with the rest of Sarah’s family tree. On April 12, they rolled out of the yard of their homestead in three ox-drawn wagons.
Seven months later, after joining a party of emigrants led by George Donner, Sarah and her family tree arrived at Truckee Lake in the Sierra Nevada Mountains just as the first heavy snows of the season clogged the pass yet to be of them. After a series of desperate attempts to cross the mountains, the party improvised cabins and slaughtered what remained of their emaciated livestock. By early December they were beginning to starve.
Sarah’s father, a Vermonter, was the only member of the party familiar with snowshoes. Under his instruction, fifteen sets of snowshoes were hastily constructed from oxbows and rawhide, and on December 15, Sarah and fourteen additional relatively young, healthy people set out for California on foot, hoping to get relief for the others. Over the next thirty-two days they endured nearly incomprehensible hardships and horrors.
In this gripping narrative, Daniel James Brown takes the reader along on every painful footstep of Sarah’s journey. Along the way, he weaves into the tale revealing insights garnered from a variety of modern scientific perspectives–psychology, physiology, forensics, and archaeology–producing a tale that is not only spell-binding but richly informative.
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Daniel James Brown has done something that very few history writers achieve in a career. He takes a past theme, the tale of the infamous Donner party, and made it exciting: a book you could not place down. To do that and provide a fact-based account that will educate the public on an incident that has been distorted by the passage of time evokes the early work of Ambrose.
Brown chose to carry the narrative by focusing on one of the survivors, Sarah Grave, a young bride moving west with her family tree. Through Sarah, we see the west unfold – the seasons, the impact on people and animals, and finally the tragedy. Through Sarah we also experience the incredible power of human spirit, able to overcome unthinkable hardships and yet finding the might to survive.
Ambrose wrote a critique of his early works in “To America,” and it applies very well here. Ambrose said he finally broke free from the “university mindset” to take his writing to another level. And that is where I find my few issues with this work. Brown seems compelled to take a smack at ex- President Bush in the introduction in what felt like an attempt to please a liberal university professor. It was unnecessary and heavy handed. As he develops, Brown will also learn to better judge the placement of asides and footnotes. I have probably spent too much time on criticism already, because these issues are easily overcome by the truly powerful narrative.
I highly recommend this book and I look forwards to his next. If Brown can continue to renovate his obvious talent he will surely help continue the fantastic American tradition of history writers.
Reader’s Rating: 4 / 5
The theme matter of this book was appealing to me, but it read like a horrible history textbook that would be required for school. I thought it might read more like an appealing tale. I did not end it because it was so horrible.
Reader’s Rating: 1 / 5
I was under the impression that this book was a fictional account of the infamous Donner party mishap. But, while there are segments that read like fiction, most of it reads like a history book. As a result, the flow is interrupted and the tale is hard to get into. To be honest, I gave up about middle through. If you want to know about the Donner party incident, you might find the book appealing–just don’t expect a novel.
Reader’s Rating: 3 / 5
This was a excellent book but I had to skim over some of the things about history. I like more of a fiction and not so much history. All in all it was a excellent tale line about the Donner party and their hardships and all of the greed and pettiness.
Reader’s Rating: 4 / 5
“The Indifferent Stars Above” is a nonfiction account of the Donner party, particularly focusing on Sarah Graves, a young bride traveling with her family tree and her spouse to California.
The tale is well-told, with lots of background about significant topics — geography, the societal norms of the times, weather trends, etc. The leader doesn’t completely make it at bringing a lot of the people in the tale to life, though — they feel strangely distant. And a lot of them blend together after awhile. (I had a hard time keeping them straight — there is a list in the back of the book detailing who was who, but I didn’t see it until after I finished the book!)
Overall, I wish I hadn’t read this book. OK, so I finished it in two days, because I had to find out what happened to Sarah and her family tree and their traveling companions … but I have the feeling some of the rather graphic images from this book are going to be with me for a long, long time. (Yes, I know — what did I expect from reading a book about the Donner Party?!) The toughest part to read for me, especially as a mother of two small ones, were the accounts of the children’s suffering.
So, I would say this is a worthwhile read if you have a lot of interest in the settling of the West in all-purpose or the Donner Party in particular — but only if you aren’t easily fazed.
Reader’s Rating: 3 / 5