Without-Feathers.com

Winter of Entrapment: A New Look at the Donner Party

Book Review
October 28, 2007

About:
Author: Joseph A. King
Type: Nonfiction
Genre: Disaster/Survival

Anyone who has read George R. Stewart’s classic Donner Party narrative Ordeal by Hunger will agree that, despite being a generally well-researched and readable books, it is racist and sexist and highly dated. Obviously Joseph A. King agrees, since he’s written a book that seems solely dedicated to countering Stewart’s views—and, while his motive (to vindicate the vilified foreigners, particularly the Irish Catholic Breen family) is honorable enough, he’s so adamant in his own views that he swings too far the other way. Stewart’s book was racist, but so is King’s; in his zeal to clear the Breen name and defend the historical underdogs, he spends most of his time attacking the white Protestant members of the ordeal. While he seems to have found good first-hand sources, he doesn’t use them well, or even in a correct and scholarly way—he idolizes the sources that support his theories and dismisses out-of-hand the ones that don’t. It’s a shame that a historian seeking to rectify historical errors only succeeded in committing the same errors himself.