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Title: Ordeal by Hunger: The Story of the Donner Party by George Rippey Stewart ISBN: 0-7812-5092-7 Publisher: Reprint Services Corp Pub. Date: January, 1994 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $75.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.44 (18 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: An American Tragedy
Comment: This account of the doomed Donner party reads like a thriller, especially if you use a map to follow its route. There is something of the Titanic in reading of their descent toward death. They could have survived one mistake, but they made many. They started late to cross the country. They moved slowly. Taking bad advice, they had to blaze a new route through the Wasatch Mountains. They came apart trying to cross the desert west of Great Salt Lake. Finally reaching the eastern slope of the Sierra Range, they rested too long and were trapped by deep snows at the crossing we now call Donner Pass. Their subsequent starvation and cannibalism gets most attention when you hear about the Donner party, but the real story is what happens when well-meaning people make mistakes, due to lack of knowledge. There is also tremendous heroism as families try to survive and rescuers from California try to reach the marooned people. Stewart tells a masterful story.
Rating: 5
Summary: Would you...? Don't answer lightly: pray for those who did
Comment: The basics of this classic human story of survival used to be common knowledge to every Western schoolchild. Perhaps political correctness has taken the sting out of it by avoiding the difficult details, labeling them as being unsuitable for children. But in doing so, Westerners have reduced the Donner Party story to a spurious stain on American character--a ghastly blot to be rubbed out and forgotten, when it is in fact a triumphant lesson, an epic of Shakespearian porportions. And the man who best told the story of these 80-odd Americans, wrenching it away from the penny-dreadful press of the 19th Century, slicing away the innuendo and whispers, giving it poignancy and humanity, was George Rippey Stewart and his book, "Ordeal By Hunger". Seventy years later, it still triumphs as a classic of its kind.
Stewart's style, which is searching and quiet, epitomizes the newspaperman's emphasis on fact. Yet there are passages in "Ordeal" that are so delicately humane, so generous and compassionate, that you will wish Mr. Stewart was still alive, so that you may thank him. Again and again, he emphasizes what should be obvious--that cannibalism was only a part of the ordeal, a symptom of that place in human experience where only Will stands between life and oblivion. That is a dark country, indeed--darker, even, than cannibalism.
There have been a dozen or more major books on the Donner Party catastrophe since the mid-1800's. The first were obsessed with shocking detal. The more recent books have left a strange impression of sanitized, reductionalist "cheerfulness"--a sign, I fear, of our own time's obsession with relativist pragmatism. The man who saw the Party's members for what they were--a slice of the humanity of us all, acting out a Morality Play that is timeless--was George Stewart. "Ordeal By Hunger" should stand with the very best works of American letters.
Rating: 5
Summary: Six Star Material
Comment: Yes, the maps are next to useless. Yes, Stewart probably has some facts skewed. Yes, he had his biases.
BUT, this book WILL leave you paralyzed with horror and wonder. The Donner Party saga may be one of the greatest "If Only..." stories of all time.
For updated details of the story, see Kristin Johnson's superb web site.
But for sheer electrifying narrative, this is the place to start!!!
(Frankly, I can't even imagine giving this book less than four stars. One star??? Hello???)
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Title: The Donner Party Chronicles: A Day-by-Day Account of a Doomed Wagon Train, 1846-47 by Frank Mullen ISBN: 1890591017 Publisher: Nevada Humanities Committee Pub. Date: September, 1997 List Price(USD): $40.00 |
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Title:The Donner Party ASIN: B00007G1YL Publisher: Warner Home Video Pub. Date: 14 January, 2003 List Price(USD): $19.98 Comparison N/A, buy it from Amazon for $17.98 |
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Title: The Expedition of Donner Party and Its Tragic Fate by Eliza P. Donner Houghton, Eliza Donner Houghton, Kristin Johnson ISBN: 0803273045 Publisher: Univ of Nebraska Pr Pub. Date: November, 1997 List Price(USD): $17.95 |
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Title: History of the Donner Party: A Tragedy of the Sierra by Charles F. McGlashan, George H. Hinkle, Bliss M. Hinkle ISBN: 0804703671 Publisher: Stanford Univ Pr (T) Pub. Date: April, 1994 List Price(USD): $21.95 |
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Title: Winter of Entrapment: A New Look at the Donner Party by Joseph A. King, Jo King ISBN: 0960850090 Publisher: K & K Pubns Pub. Date: June, 1998 List Price(USD): $13.95 |
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