Indifferent Stars Above, The: The Harrowing Saga of the Donner Party (P.S.)

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The Boys in the Boat: Nine Americans and Their Epic Quest for Gold at the 1936 Berlin Olympics 4 stars

It reminds us that as ordinary as we might be, we can, if we choose, take the harder road, walk forth bravely under the indifferent stars. We can hazard the ravages of chance. We can choose to endure what seems unendurable, and thereby open up the possibility of prevailing. We can awaken to the world as it is, and, seeing it with eyes wide open, we can nevertheless embrace hope rather than despair.”Exaaactly. How is that morally worse than killing a living thing? I’m just saying, if I’m starving to death and my brother dies before me but the family cow is still around, you best believe I’m shish kebabing my bro and bidding the cow goodday. One of the best aspects of the book is how thoroughly Brown researched every aspect of the journey to California, and goes into exhaustive detail about everything from wagon construction to frontier gender politics, so that the reader has a complete picture of what life was like for the people who would eventually be trapped in the snow on the shores of Donner Lake. (Apparently there's a boulder next to Donner Lake with a plaque in it, informing people that a family from the Donner Party used it as a wall for their shelter when they were trapped in ten-foot snow drifts, and there is something so chilling about that fact, I can't get over it) The next two lines of ‘ A Dream of Death’ complete the first rhyming pattern and establish that the unknown person was a woman who died in a foreign land. She is buried there by the strangers who find her; “nail the boards” suggests building a coffin for the individual. Here, the language used is harsh and unpleasant; “nail” and “above her face” in particular are two bits of vocabulary that remind the reader of the unpleasant nature of the necessary burial. The author himself traveled as best he was able, the route Sarah Graves and company traversed. His personal thoughts at the end of the book on their journey, and later what happened to the survivors made it especially poignant for me. On November 25, 2006, thirty-five-year-old James Kim and his wife, Kati, and their two daughters found themselves snowbound in their Saab station wagon after making a wrong turn onto a logging road in Oregon’s Coast Range.”

Also, this book really, really, really could have used 1) a map of the journey, and 2) a dramatis personae, or perhaps some genealogical trees, of the relevant characters. Those visuals would have greatly mitigated my confusion and the time spent Googling things. froze hard last night to day clear & warm Wind S: E: blowing briskly. Martha’s jaw swelled with the toothache: hungry times in camp; plenty hides, but the folks will not eat them. We eat them with a tolerable good appetite. Thanks be to Almighty God. Amen. Mrs. Murphy said here yesterday that [she] thought she would Commence on Milt. & eat him. I don’t [think] that she has done so yet; it is distressing. The Donners, 4 days ago, told the California folks that they [would] commence to eat the dead people if they did not succeed, that day or next, in finding their cattle, [which were] then under ten or twelve feet of snow, & [the Donners] did not know the spot or near it; I suppose they have done so ere this time." Brown draws from the many previously published accounts of the tragedy, letters from the party and those who knew them, accounts of life on the Oregon and California trails, genealogical databases, and his own travel along the trail…but he tells the tale with a novelist’s touch.” Like all people in all times, the emigrant men and women, as well as the Native American men and women, of the 1840s were complex bundles of fear and hope, greed and generosity, nobility and savagery. And in the end, each of them was, of course, an individual, as unique and vital and finely nuanced as you or me." – from the Author’s Note by Daniel James Brownof 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars The Indifferent Stars Above: The Harrowing Saga of a Donner Party Bride by Daniel James Brown I think this was a wise move and the book benefitted from it. Through Sarah, I got to know her family and the other families with her. I went from the pioneer trail, fraught with hardships, to the eventual snowbound mountains. With Sarah, I took off on homemade snowshoes with her husband and several others to try and find help. It was devastating and my heart broke in several places along the way. For Sarah and for all of them who I had become so intimately acquainted with. I highly recommend this book to anyone that enjoys true adventure stories. It is extremely well-researched and all of the information is presented in a narrative that is never dry but always quite compelling. If I had any criticism, it would mainly be the large cast of characters, which eventually sort themselves out. The author unfortunately seems to not consider Indigenous People human beings. The racism isn't at all subtle and it is grating. They were having a hard time walking normally now, staggering as if drunk at times and needing to stop to rest every quarter of a mile or so.”

There was so much that I didn't know. I didn't know, for example, that the "Donner Party" actually consisted of several extended families traveling to California together, along with a handful of single men hired as workers. I didn't know that the Graves family, who form the focal point of Brown's book, were hardscrabble poineers who had survived plenty of harsh conditions before the fateful trip, and were hardly the foolhardy amateurs that they're sometimes reduced to. I also didn't know that the Donner Party was traveling a route that had never actually been attempted before, and was created by some guy who looked at a map and thought, huh, they can save 200 miles by just cutting through this salt desert in Utah! (spoiler alert, it was not a good shortcut). Basically, these people were doomed from the moment they set out from Independence, Missouri (a whole three weeks after the deadline to avoid the winter, by the way) and it's a miracle that there were any survivors at all. Most of the women manifested a constancy and courage, a coolness, presence of mind, and patience. The difficulties, dangers, and misfortunes which seemed frequently to prostrate the men, called forth the energies of the gentler sex and gave them a sublime elevation of character, which allowed them to abide the most withering blasts of adversity with unshakeable firmness. By far the best part of The Indifferent Stars Above is Brown’s inclusion of the personal stories and lives at the center of the Donner tragedy is one aspect that gives the story he tells much more depth but he goes far beyond that. As things begin to grow worse for the Donner Party, Brown includes extensive research on how extreme conditions like starvation and freezing temperatures impact the human body and psyche --effectively putting the reader in a headspace where they are able to somewhat understand the seemingly incomprehensible levels of human suffering Sarah and the others faced in the unrelenting mountains that winter. I won't lie: some parts of the story were hard to read. There were gruesome, bloody parts. And I spent nearly the entire story knowing how things would end up and feeling completely helpless while I watched it all unfold. The first third of the book moves alOne event that significantly impacted the work of Yeats was his meeting with Maud Gonne, a young woman who became the subject of Yeats’s desires and infatuations. He came to care for her deeply, and she became the inspiration for many of his poems. Although he proposed marriage to her — at least four times — she never married him, saying that she believed a poet could never be happy unless they had unhappiness in their lives to fuel the poetry that gives them solace. She is even cited to have claimed that the world would thank her for never marrying him. People who know about such things seem to agree that it's credible as a work of history. I found it to be well written and evocative. I expect that getting both of those things to be true was a writerly challenge, but Brown did a fine job. There have apparently been a number of other books on the topic, written with varying degrees of journalistic rigor pretty much since the first of the survivors staggered in out of the mountains. Brown did a thorough, meticulous job of sorting out the existing accounts and combining that was both readable and at least plausibly accurate. But Charles Stanton probably died psychologically before he died physiologically. As John Leach points out in Survival Psychology, science has long recognized that under some circumstances people are able “to die gently, and often suddenly, through no organic cause.” In other words, we are able, sometimes, to will ourselves to death, or at least to cease willing ourselves to live. In 1972,”

I have a book of poems by Yeats which makes me think that, later in life, he re-drafted this poem. The line which includes 'made out of two bits of wood' is not the calibre of the English that Yeats wrote - it is the kind of line that a poet writes in a rough draft. The poem in my book is finely written and more beautiful. I found out about this book through Last Podcast on the Left, which did a phenomenal three-part episode series on the Donner Party and used this book as the primary source for their information. I was so fascinated and intrigued by this story, which I'd only ever heard about in vague details, that I decided to read the book for myself. This book not only tells of Sarah Graves journey but also of the journey that the author took in writing this book. Sarah Graves survived the journey but her young husband did not. She did go on to get married two more times and have children. This way of writing nonfiction is my absolute favorite: You can tell that the author has so thoroughly researched it, has come to so inhabit the space, that even though there is not, say, an hour-by-hour journal of what occurred, the author is able to make educated guesses that are rich and colorful and informative. This is nonfiction, not historical fiction, and yet... you sit at the campfire with the immigrants. You feel those deadly flakes of snow as they cover them like a pall. Your stomach squirms with the impossible hunger and your mind with the impossible dilemma. The Indifferent Stars Above is an ideal pairing of talent and material…With tragedy of this scale an unadorned telling of the events speaks loudest…The understatement of simple circumstances delivers the emotional wallop all by itself.”A series of unfortunate events and bad choices like few people ever see. The book focuses on Sarah Graves, newly married and deeply in love, as she travels across the country with her family. Under normal circumstances, at sea level, the eye can absorb UVB rays without damage. But with every thousand feet in elevation gain, the strength of ultraviolet rays increases by 5 percent. So at the elevation of Donner Lake, for instance, UVB rays are approximately 30 percent stronger than at sea level.”