Latest Donner book

Well, it's here! Daniel James Brown's The Indifferent Stars Above is now available. Mary Roach, in her favorable New York Times review, described it as "an ideal pairing of talent and material" and Brown as "a deft and ambitious storyteller, sifting through the copious and often conflicting details... to forge a trim, surging, minute by minute narrative." (Roach is no stranger to the Donner Party, having written about ghost hunting at Donner Memorial State Park in Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife.)

FWIW, I'm delighted with the book. While I care about all the members of the Donner Party, I've always been partial to the Graves family, and this is the first major book centered on them -- the Reeds and the Donners get most of the press. Dan works in a great deal of interesting information about the Graves family and about starvation, hypothermia, and other scientific aspects of the story. He also revises the Forlorn Hope's itinerary and gives a explanation as to how the snowshoers went astray. (I wish he'd included a map, but can't fault him for not doing so: finding decent cartography is a big problem for trail writers.)

Various reviews of Indifferent Stars have already appeared on the Internet. Some writers don't like the discursions, others do. Donner Party buffs will, I think, welcome the new information, new approach, and new things to think about.

Author news

James D. Houston, whose 2001 novel Snow Mountain Passage focused on the Reeds of the Donner Party, died in on Thursday, April 16, 2009. The house in Santa Cruz where he lived for many years had once been the home of Patty Reed Lewis. Read his obituary here.

On a cheerier note, Gabrielle Burton's Searching for Tamsen Donner has received some great reviews. I found it a delightful read, myself, and am glad the press has been positive. You can find out more about Gabrielle and her book at her new website.

I also heard from Daniel James Brown. His The Indifferent Stars Above: The Harrowing Saga of a Donner Party Bride -- the bride in question being Sarah Graves Fosdick -- will be out soon. I met Dan at the symposium at the end of the Donner Party tour in 2006 and know how much work he's put into this book, so I'm really looking forward to reading it. If you visit his website at HarperCollins you can pre-order a copy.