Ordeal by Hunger

Ordeal by Hunger
Author: George R. Stewart
Publisher: HMH
Total Pages: 419
Release: 2013-09-30
Genre: History
ISBN: 0547525605

“Compulsive reading—a wonderful account, both scholarly and gripping, of a horrifying episode in the history of the west.” —Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. The tragedy of the Donner party constitutes one of the most amazing stories of the American West. In 1846 eighty-seven people—men, women, and children—set out for California, persuaded to attempt a new overland route. After struggling across the desert, losing many oxen, and nearly dying of thirst, they reached the very summit of the Sierras, only to be trapped by blinding snow and bitter storms. Many perished; some survived by resorting to cannibalism; all were subjected to unbearable suffering. Incorporating the diaries of the survivors and other contemporary documents, George Stewart wrote the definitive history of that ill-fated band of pioneers; an astonishing account of what human beings may endure and achieve in the final press of circumstance.

Desperate Passage

Desperate Passage
Author: Ethan Rarick
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 305
Release: 2008-02-04
Genre: History
ISBN: 0198041500

In late October 1846, the last wagon train of that year's westward migration stopped overnight before resuming its arduous climb over the Sierra Nevada Mountains, unaware that a fearsome storm was gathering force. After months of grueling travel, the 81 men, women and children would be trapped for a brutal winter with little food and only primitive shelter. The conclusion is known: by spring of the next year, the Donner Party was synonymous with the most harrowing extremes of human survival. But until now, the full story of what happened, what it tells us about human nature and about America's westward expansion, remained shrouded in myth. Drawing on fresh archaeological evidence, recent research on topics ranging from survival rates to snowfall totals, and heartbreaking letters and diaries made public by descendants a century-and-a-half after the tragedy, Ethan Rarick offers an intimate portrait of the Donner party and their unimaginable ordeal: a mother who must divide her family, a little girl who shines with courage, a devoted wife who refuses to abandon her husband, a man who risks his life merely to keep his word. But Rarick resists both the gruesomely sensationalist accounts of the Donner party as well as later attempts to turn the survivors into archetypal pioneer heroes. "The Donner Party," Rarick writes, "is a story of hard decisions that were neither heroic nor villainous. Often, the emigrants displayed a more realistic and typically human mixture of generosity and selfishness, an alloy born of necessity." A fast-paced, heart-wrenching, clear-eyed narrative history, A Desperate Hope casts new light on one of America's most horrific encounters between the dream of a better life and the harsh realities such dreams so often must confront.

Earth Abides

Earth Abides
Author: George R. Stewart
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Total Pages: 325
Release: 1993-12
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0899683703

Winter of Entrapment

Winter of Entrapment
Author: Joseph A. King
Publisher:
Total Pages: 265
Release: 1992-01-01
Genre: Donner Party
ISBN: 9780888350305

The Best Land Under Heaven: The Donner Party in the Age of Manifest Destiny

The Best Land Under Heaven: The Donner Party in the Age of Manifest Destiny
Author: Michael Wallis
Publisher: Liveright Publishing
Total Pages: 575
Release: 2017-06-06
Genre: History
ISBN: 0871407701

Longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence Finalist for the Oklahoma Book Award A Publishers Weekly Holiday Guide History Pick “A book so gripping it can scarcely be put down.... Superb.” —New York Times Book Review "WESTWARD HO! FOR OREGON AND CALIFORNIA!" In the eerily warm spring of 1846, George Donner placed this advertisement in a local newspaper as he and a restless caravan prepared for what they hoped would be the most rewarding journey of a lifetime. But in eagerly pursuing what would a century later become known as the "American dream," this optimistic-yet-motley crew of emigrants was met with a chilling nightmare; in the following months, their jingoistic excitement would be replaced by desperate cries for help that would fall silent in the deadly snow-covered mountains of the Sierra Nevada. We know these early pioneers as the Donner Party, a name that has elicited horror since the late 1840s. With The Best Land Under Heaven, Wallis has penned what critics agree is “destined to become the standard account” (Washington Post) of the notorious saga. Cutting through 160 years of myth-making, the “expert storyteller” (True West) compellingly recounts how the unlikely band of early pioneers met their fate. Interweaving information from hundreds of newly uncovered documents, Wallis illuminates how a combination of greed and recklessness led to one of America’s most calamitous and sensationalized catastrophes. The result is a “fascinating, horrifying, and inspiring” (Oklahoman) examination of the darkest side of Manifest Destiny.

The Hunger

The Hunger
Author: Alma Katsu
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 417
Release: 2023-09-05
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0593544293

"Supernatural suspense at its finest . . . It will scare the pants off you." —The New York Times Book Review Evil is invisible, and it is everywhere. That is the only way to explain the series of misfortunes that have plagued the wagon train known as the Donner Party. Depleted rations, bitter quarrels, and the mysterious death of a little boy have driven the isolated travelers to the brink of madness. Though they dream of what awaits them in the West, long-buried secrets begin to emerge, and dissent among them escalates to the point of murder and chaos. As members of the group begin to disappear, the survivors start to wonder if there really is something disturbing, and hungry, waiting for them in the mountains...and whether the evil that has unfolded around them may have in fact been growing within them all along.

Hunger

Hunger
Author: Knut Hamsun
Publisher: Tebbo
Total Pages: 88
Release: 2012-06
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 9781486152063

Hunger by Knut Hamsun - The Original Classic Edition Finally available, a high quality book of the original classic edition. This is a new and freshly published edition of this culturally important work, which is now, at last, again available to you. Enjoy this classic work today. These selected paragraphs distill the contents and give you a quick look inside: From there his parents moved when he was only four to settle in the far northern district of Lofoden--that land of extremes, where the year, and not the day, is evenly divided between darkness and light; where winter is a long dreamless sleep, and summer a passionate dream without sleep; where land and sea meet and intermingle so gigantically that man is all but crushed between the two--or else raised to titanic measures by the spectacle of their struggle. ...But when Kareno, the irreconcilable rebel of At the Gates of the Kingdom, the heaven-storming truth-seeker of The Game of Life, and the acclaimed radical leader in the first acts of Sunset Glow, surrenders at last to the powers that be in order to gain a safe and sheltered harbor for his declining years, then another man of 29 stands ready to denounce him and to take up the rebel cry of youth to which he has become a traitor. Hamsuns ironical humor and whimsical manner of expression do more than the plot itself to knit the plays into an organic unit, and several of the characters are delightfully drawn, particularly the two women who play the greatest part in Karenos life: his wife Eline, and Teresita, who is one more of his many feminine embodiments of the passionate and changeable Northland nature. ...From 1897 to 1912 Hamsun produced a series of volumes that simply marked a further development of the tendencies shown in his first novels: Siesta, short stories, 1897; Victoria a novel with a charming love story that embodies the tenderest note in his production, 1898; In Wonderland, travelling sketches from the Caucasus, 1903; Brushwood, short stories, 1903; The Wild Choir, a collection of poems, 1904; Dreamers, a novel, 1904; Struggling Life, short stories and travelling sketches, 1905; Beneath the Autumn Star a novel, 1906; Benoni, and Rosa, two novels forming to some extent sequels to Pan, 1908; A Wanderer Plays with Muted Strings, a novel, 1909; and The Last Joy, a shapeless work, half novel and half mere uncoordinated reflections, 1912. ...I turned to a shop window and stopped in order to give him an opportunity of getting ahead, but when, after a lapse of some minutes, I again walked on there was the man still in front of me--he too had stood stock still, --without stopping to reflect I made three or four furious onward strides, caught him up, and slapped him on the shoulder.

Ramp Hollow

Ramp Hollow
Author: Steven Stoll
Publisher: Hill and Wang
Total Pages: 433
Release: 2017-11-21
Genre: History
ISBN: 1429946970

How the United States underdeveloped Appalachia Appalachia—among the most storied and yet least understood regions in America—has long been associated with poverty and backwardness. But how did this image arise and what exactly does it mean? In Ramp Hollow, Steven Stoll launches an original investigation into the history of Appalachia and its place in U.S. history, with a special emphasis on how generations of its inhabitants lived, worked, survived, and depended on natural resources held in common. Ramp Hollow traces the rise of the Appalachian homestead and how its self-sufficiency resisted dependence on money and the industrial society arising elsewhere in the United States—until, beginning in the nineteenth century, extractive industries kicked off a “scramble for Appalachia” that left struggling homesteaders dispossessed of their land. As the men disappeared into coal mines and timber camps, and their families moved into shantytowns or deeper into the mountains, the commons of Appalachia were, in effect, enclosed, and the fate of the region was sealed. Ramp Hollow takes a provocative look at Appalachia, and the workings of dispossession around the world, by upending our notions about progress and development. Stoll ranges widely from literature to history to economics in order to expose a devastating process whose repercussions we still feel today.