New Book Available

I checked the Jesse Stuart Foundation website yesterday and Allan Eckert's new Donner Party book, Dark Journey, is available for purchase here. 334 p., $25.00. Haven't read it yet, but hope to soon.

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.

2009 looks promising for Donner Party buffs

With two, hopefully three major books about the Donner Party coming out, 2009 will be a banner year for followers of the saga.

First there's Gabrielle Burton's Searching for Tamsen Donner, published by the University of Nebraska Press and due out on March 1. Gabrielle describes her personal quest for the elusive heroine and ends with the first publication of all of Tamzene's known letters.

And you won't have long to wait for the next one: Daniel James Brown's book focusing on Sarah Graves Fosdick, The Indifferent Stars Above: The Harrowing Saga of a Donner Party Bride, is coming out on May 19. It's published by William Morrow, an imprint of HarperCollins. Dan has done a great job on his research and contributes a lot of interesting new perspectives.

As for the Alder Creek archaeology book, it's still in the works with no word yet on a publication date, but may well be out before the end of the year.

Other news: Using new software, I've been working on the New Light on the Donner Party website and am hoping to get the revised version up in the not too far distant future. (There are a lot of technical details to master and fuss with, so don't hold your breath!) I'm editing typos, correcting other errors, adding details. I've turned up a lot of biographical info: added two new individuals to the "Rescuers" page, info about Charles L. Cady, the Donners, the Reeds, Noah James, Walter Herron, and others. I've also turned up a lot of info about peripheral issues, like Walter Herron's and Tamzene Donner's families, which is interesting but not exactly relevant to the Donner story so probably won't make it to the website.

Also, Ric Burns' 1992 documentary The Donner Party, is available for download at various websites, including Blockbuster, LimeWire, The Movie Downloads, and others.

That's all for now -- Happy New Year, folks!

Books, books, books

Lots of newish Donner Party books out there or on the way.

First, I recently acquired Green Light (2000), by Patrick Breen. (No, not that Patrick Breen!) It's a horror story about a teenager named Patrick Breen who goes to a creepy summer camp in the Sierra Nevada and... well, let's just say there's a reason why it was published by a vanity press. Although it's not as awful as one might expect, I wouldn't recommend it to anybody but a diehard Donner Party fanatic.

There's another vanity press novel with a young Donner Party descendant for a protagonist, Itchy Donner (2007) by Doug Lambeth. Eleven-year-old Itchy has a rash, hence his nickname, and is obsessed with his pioneer ancestry. It's not Pulitzer Prize material, but not too bad, either. I should mention that even though the book is about a child, it's not a children's book. Available at Lulu.com for download in PDF or as a print-on-demand paperback.

Next year Oxford University Press will be publishing Ethan Rarick's Desperate Journey, the first credible attempt at a Donner Party narrative history since George R. Stewart's Ordeal by Hunger. (No, I'm not badmouthing my own book. Unfortunate Emigrants isn't a narrative history but an anthology of primary sources.) Unfortunately, Ethan doesn't seem to have much sympathy for the Donner Party and has also ta'en a scunner at James F. Reed. Granted, Reed was hard for some people to deal with and he certainly had his faults, but he had a lot of good qualities as well. Sigh. And I'd so hoped that we could get away from the namecalling that's poisoned so much Donner Party writing since Winter of Entrapment came out in 1992... We'll see what the finished result is like.

One book I'm really looking forward to is Daniel James Brown's work focusing on the Graves family and Sarah Graves Fosdick. Dan has a contract with HarperCollins; no anticipated publication date that I know of, but he's done a lot of great research and it will be very interesting to see what he does with it.