#the indifferent stars above

[haveyoureadthisbook-poll]

[bracketsoffear]

Take II, because the options were in the wrong order.

You Are What You (M)Eat: Explorations of Meat-Eating, Masculinity and Masquerade (Amy Calvert) "A fascinating essay on the concept of carnophallogocentrism (the connection between meat-eating and masculinity, as defined by Jacques Derrida) which discusses the gendered politics of consuming, preparing, and raising meat animals, viewed primarily through the lens of the US reality television series Man V. Food. Calvert argues that the show represents the sexualization of both women and meat, and represents a cultural backlash against feminism as traditional concepts of masculinity are reasserted through the grotesque displays of meat consumption onscreen."

Link

The Indifferent Stars Above (Daniel James Brown) "In April of 1846, twenty-one-year-old Sarah Graves, intent on a better future, set out west from Illinois with her new husband, her parents, and eight siblings. Seven months later, after joining a party of emigrants led by George Donner, they reached the Sierra Nevada Mountains as the first heavy snows of the season closed the pass ahead of them. In early December, starving and desperate, Sarah and fourteen others set out for California on snowshoes and, over the next thirty-two days, endured almost unfathomable hardships and horrors.

In this gripping narrative, Daniel James Brown sheds new light on one of the most infamous events in American history. Following every painful footstep of Sarah's journey with the Donner Party, Brown produces a tale both spellbinding and richly informative.

Bonus: This is a nonfiction account of The Donner Party, probably one of the most famous occurrences of survival cannibalism in history."

[rachel-sylvan-author]

"The Indifferent Stars Above: the Harrowing Saga of the Donner Party" by Daniel James Brown book recommendation by Rachel Sylvan

[seekerreads]

5-4-3-2-1 book challenge!

another booktok trend i decided to pop into bookblr!! i've watched a million of these so i wanted to make my own!

5 books I love

☄. *. ⋆Books listed:

❥ Madame Restell: The Life, Death and Resurrection of Old New York's Most Fabulous, Fearless, and Infamous Abortionist by Jennifer Wright

❥ Pet by Akwaeke Emezi

❥ The Indifferent Stars Above: The Harrowing Saga of a Donner Party Bride by Daniel James Brown

❥ Iona Iverson's Rules for Commuting by Clare Pooley

❥ Dragonfall by L.R Lam

4 books on my tbr

☄. *. ⋆Books listed:

❥ An Ember in the Ashes by Sabaa Tahir

❥ The Heart Asks Pleasure First by Karuna Ezara Parikh

❥ The Undertaking of Hart and Mercy by Megan Bannen

❥ The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova

3 books I recommend

☄. *. ⋆Books listed:

❥ Assassin's Apprentice by Robin Hobb

❥ Fireborne by Rosaria Munda

❥ Six of Crows by Leigh Bardugo

2 recent 5-star reads

☄. *. ⋆Books listed:

❥ The Six Deaths of the Saint by Alix E. Harrow

❥ Anxious People by Fredrik Backman

1 current read

☄. *. ⋆Books listed:

❥ Royal Assassin by Robin Hobb

(divider credit: @enchanthings )

[travelingviabooks]

The Indifferent Stars Above by Daniel James Brown ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

To appreciate beauty is to experience humility—to recognize that something larger and more powerful than oneself is at work in the environment.

Genre: nonfiction, biography, history

Country: USA

Short Summary:

This book follows the journey of Sarah Graves from her home in Illinois to California. She was part of the Donner Party, a group of pioneers who found themselves trapped in a snowstorm in the mountains and took extreme measures to survive.

Review:

This book is so well researched and it truly shows. I also love that the author followed the route the Graves family took and visited various locations so that he could see them and better describe what they may have seen or experienced on their journey. He writes in a way that pulls you in and helps you better understand the lives the pioneers led and the hardships they faced.

This is such a fascinating story!

Would I recommend this book?: 100%

[myhikari21things]

Read of The Indifferent Stars Above by Daniel James Brown (2009) (288pgs)

[spaceoperetta]

Very funny that I’m recommending The Indifferent Stars Above to my mother, not realizing until I’m doing so that she recommended me The Boys In The Boat, also by the same author, so I’m off to read that.

I do recommend The Indifferent Stars Above. It’s nonfiction centered around a young woman named Sarah Graves, who aimed to travel from Illinois to California with her family in the era most remembered nowadays by people of my age because of the video game The Oregon Trail. The group she travels with ended up becoming known as The Donner Party. (Which I feel like is mostly referred to as a punchline nowadays) She experiences horrors beyond the normal horrors - of which there were many - of the trip out west.

It is a lot, eon’s get me wrong, but the book was well-researched, compelling, and told with care.

[finniestoncrane]

I first read Jane Eyre the summer after 6th grade and it imprinted on my fucking mind I love it it’s one of my favorite books ever please read it

i will add it to my pile genuinely and sincerely it's in my little christmas wish list now lol, and it'll look so out of place on top of my book pile because i literally only read horror and true crime and historical fiction about horrible things

[jilyandbambi]

also jackie absolutely would've partaken in the cannibalism had she made it to the same point.

the girls eating Jackie is a horrific act, but the act itself isn't about morality. Starvation--specifically the point of starvation the Yellowjackets were at by this point--betrays the mind and body. As your muscles break down and your organs disintegrate, your nutrient-starved brain makes you hungry for literally anything you can chew and swallow, edible or not. Your brain doesn't even have to make you hallucinate, you become ravenously hungry the second anything remotely edible appears in front of you and it's nigh impossible to stop yourself from consuning the thing your brain has now identified as food.

When the girls smelled meat cooking it triggered this exact instinct. They literally couldn't have helped themselves. They were starving adolescent kids, they didn't stand a chance. Jackie would have been the same. So would Laura Lee, for that matter. They were sweet, warm-hearted girls, but they weren't saints or superhuman. They would have been starving kids like all the others.

Why didn't Coach Ben join in? He's a grown man. Yeah, but as an adult well past puberty and with a fully developed brain, he has more self-control than kids whose bodies and brains are still developing. And that's the point.

He's the proverbial adult in the room. He's supposed to be there to keep them safe and sane and he's failed. Not only have 2 of his charges died on his watch, but now the remaining kids have starved to the point of eating their dead.

If it were a matter of being scared of/disgusted by them Ben would've burned down the cabin and fucked off that night. But he stays because he's afraid OF them and FOR them.

They aren't monsters. They're kids. They're starving. They're desperate. Their brains aren't finished growing. Their already-limited self-control & reasoning is being crippled by a body that's starting to literally eat itself as a last resort. They don't resort to cannibalism due to their being inherently violent or predatious, or because they were intrinsically worse people than the teammate and team captain who predeceased them.

THEY. WERE. STARVING.

[watertaxadermy]

Doing a school project about a book and I’m drawing the main character’s (Sarah Graves) Fiancé (Jay Fosdick) and… WHY DID I DECIDE TO DRAW HIS VIOLIN AAAAAHHH?! I THOUGHT PAUL MCCARTNEY’S VIOLIN BASS WAS HARD TO DRAW BUT AN ACTUAL VIOLIN IS AWFUL 😭😭😭 book btw is The Indifferent Stars Above. It’s about the Donner party and I highly recommend.

[bracketsoffear]

The Hunger (Alma Katsu) "Tamsen Donner must be a witch. 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 pioneers to the brink of madness. They cannot escape the feeling that someone--or something--is stalking them. Whether it was a curse from the beautiful Tamsen, the choice to follow a disastrous experimental route West, or just plain bad luck--the 90 men, women, and children of the Donner Party are at the brink of one of the deadliest and most disastrous western adventures in American history.

While the ill-fated group struggles to survive in the treacherous mountain conditions--searing heat that turns the sand into bubbling stew; snows that freeze the oxen where they stand--evil begins to grow around them, and within them. As members of the party begin to disappear, they must ask themselves "What if there is something waiting in the mountains? Something disturbing and diseased…and very hungry?"

The Indifferent Stars Above (Daniel James Brown) "In April of 1846, twenty-one-year-old Sarah Graves, intent on a better future, set out west from Illinois with her new husband, her parents, and eight siblings. Seven months later, after joining a party of emigrants led by George Donner, they reached the Sierra Nevada Mountains as the first heavy snows of the season closed the pass ahead of them. In early December, starving and desperate, Sarah and fourteen others set out for California on snowshoes and, over the next thirty-two days, endured almost unfathomable hardships and horrors.

In this gripping narrative, Daniel James Brown sheds new light on one of the most infamous events in American history. Following every painful footstep of Sarah's journey with the Donner Party, Brown produces a tale both spellbinding and richly informative.

Bonus: This is a nonfiction account of The Donner Party, probably one of the most famous occurrences of survival cannibalism in history."

[alethiometry]

iasip has truly enriched my life bc now every time i read about a historical figure who was a total piece of shit i can't help but think of that scene where mac is giving a presentation and slaps a giant BITCH sticker on photos of like galileo and isaac newton

[arse-blathanna]

My toxic reading trait is that when it comes to nonfiction I almost exclusively end up reading about survival cannibalism.

[justanotherhomelessromantic]

i'm going to spew about the books i read in january. the last two books i read were god-awful and i want to complain about them so here i go!

January as a whole was kind of a bad month for reading because most of the books I read were really bad-to-mid LOL

the first two I read were What Mother Won't Tell Me and Knock Knock Open Wide. What Mother Won't Tell Me is a domestic thriller about a girl who finds out her family isn't what it seems. Very boring characters, very boring prose, very boring twist/ kind of insulting twist, all around very boring, but short enough that I finished it.

Knock Knock Open Wide was decent. An evil children's show creepypasta, but blended with Irish folklore. I usually find 'tHis sHOw fOr KIdS iS aKsHulY teH EvILz!!1!' super trite and boring but this managed to pull it off in a way that wasn't really lame and try-hard.

I've never watched an episode of iCarly, and I don't care enough about celebrities to read their memoirs, but I'm Glad My Mom Died was the only genuinely great book I read in January. Jennette McCurdy is a terrific writer. The way she ping-pongs back and forth between harrowing trauma and humor is so good and deeply uncomfortable LOL

The last two i read were The Star and the Strange Moon and Fourth Wing. Both are absolutely awful.

Strange Moon has a great premise: a 60s starlet goes missing while filming a movie. Despite the film never being finished, mysterious showings appear every ten years with new-but-impossible footage of said starlet. Meanwhile, a guy tries to figure out how this missing star is related to the death of his mother.

Spoilers, the answers are: 1) a demon did it, 2) the mom blames the star for her (the mom's) career not taking off.

it's more convoluted than that, but this whole book is a disaster. A Meandering plot, the author can't pick a genre, boring male protag, Strong Female Protagonist™️(who still gets rescued by the male protag LOL), and a shitty romance that- no joke- gets shoved into the last 50-100 pages of a 400+ page book. Truly abysmal.

then comes Fourth Wing. I kinda vague'd about this a while ago, and i reaaally tried to finish this, but good god I could not take it. Absolutely cringy dialogue, boring characters, world building that leads to massive plot holes, and a protag that's so incompetent, everyone else needs to save her ass constantly.

Seriously I cannot stress enough how awful of a protagonist Violet is. Her idiot mom put Violet, the child with brittle bone disease (not actually what she has but basically that), (edit: after reading some very cathartic one star reviews, someone linked a very good essay about Violet, her chronic pain, and how its probably closer to Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome) in the Fantasy Marine Corps where the training regularly kills people. Yet Violet, despite essentially being trained as a historian, INSISTS that she can make it as a dragon rider. Girlie, the reason you are even alive is through the intervention of OTHER PEOPLE. You SUCK at fantasy military.

the whole thing feels deeply juvenile too. like, the constant allusions to sex feel so desperate to sound like it's mature when it's just there to bump the age rating up from YA to New Adult. just trash LMAO

Those two were so bad I've basically given up on fiction for the next month or two. I'd rather read nonfiction about the Donner Party than another YA masquerading as an adult book.

[roiiibintheibis]

tfw when you're so busy hyperfixating on something tumblr and takealot are working together to remind you that you might have a problem: