Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil. Reading The Indifferent Stars Above (horror aside) is incredibly easy. I love the way that Brown writes. A nonfiction book that reads like fiction, you’ll find it easy to get pulled into the tragic story of the Donner Party. Once I got started, it was hard to put it down. William Butler Yeats lived between 1865 and 1939 and is considered to be one of the foremost poets in Irish and British literature. A great many of his works are commonly read and remembered today, including ‘ The Second Coming‘. He is also remembered for having won a Nobel Prize in Literature. He is also known for highly symbolic and imagery-based works that constitute both physical and abstract meanings.

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.

Overall, Donner Party men died at nearly twice the rate of women (56.6 percent of the males, 29.4 percent of the females). They died much sooner, too. Fourteen Donner Party males died before the first female did. And it was men in their prime years who died earliest and in the largest numbers. Of twenty-one men between the ages of twenty and thirty-nine, 66 percent died; of thirty women in the same age group, only 14 percent died.” 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. 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. As to be expected, this book was an emotionally exhausting read. Though I knew going in what the basic story of the Donner Party was, reading about the details still kept me on the edge of my seat in anticipation of what horror these poor people were to face next. 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.”

Of the remaining ten men, one, Charles Stanton, falls behind. He tells the party he will catch up, but he sits down in the snow and dies. Five of the men and the boy later die and are eaten by the remaining party. The two remaining white men start talking about killing the Native American guides, who wisely disappear that night; later, however, they are discovered by the party, extremely weak—the guides were the only ones who refused to consume human flesh, so they had had virtually no food. One of the two white men, William Foster, had become totally unglued by then, and he shoots the two guides. Everyone eats them.

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) 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. When one of them suffered a broken jaw, a cord was tied to the jaw and it was yanked out of his face. Then, slowly and deliberately, their tormentors began to slice off bits and pieces of their flesh—fingers and toes and other appendages—and stuff them down the men’s throats. Finally the two men were disemboweled and left to die.” Later, as the emigrants struggled to survive in the frozen Alder Creek Valley, Brown describes their situation thus:

In this gripping narrative, Brown reveals the extremes of endurance that underlie the history of this nation, and more than that, of humanity in any part of the world, even today, surviving great peril in search of a better life. Nina Burleigh

The Indifferent Stars Above traces the footsteps of Sarah Graves, a young bride who left her home in Illinois in the spring of 1846, bound for California. Along the way, she and her new husband became members of the notorious and ill-fated Donner Party and ran into a world of trouble. Sarah’s story is among the least known but most compelling aspects of the Donner Party tragedy. Library Journal calls the book “a fresh and intriguing telling.” 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. Access-restricted-item true Addeddate 2012-04-09 14:01:37 Boxid IA180701 Camera Canon EOS 5D Mark II City New York Donor

urn:oclc:877991336 Republisher_date 20120706193658 Republisher_operator [email protected] Scandate 20120705195121 Scanner scribe17.shenzhen.archive.org Scanningcenter shenzhen Source It was really jarring to read this attempt at traveling West by wagon when most of the stories I read are not this extreme. I think I've always tended to have a fairly romanticized idea of the pioneers that took their families and wagons and re-settled out west. (I'm obsessed, actually.) For a group of people that-by definition-failed at their goal of arriving safe and sound, they were a group of tough, badass women, men, and children. 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.The poem is intriguing; Who was that person? And why that indifference? A powerful tragic story can be woven,keeping in mind the beautiful last two lines'She was more beautiful than thy first love,but now lies under boards'