Searching for Tamsen Donner
Gabrielle Burton
(Author)
Description
Tamsen Donner. For most the name conjures the ill-fated Donner party trapped in the snows of the Sierra Nevada Mountains in 1846-47. Others might know Tamsen as the stoic pioneer woman who saw her children to safety but stayed with her dying husband at the cost of her own life. For Gabrielle Burton, Tamsen's story, fascinating in its own right, had long seemed something more: the story of a woman's life writ large, one whose impossible balancing of self, motherhood, and marriage spoke to Burton's own experience.This book tells of Burton's search to solve the mystery of Tamsen Donner for herself. A graceful mingling of history and memoir, Searching for Tamsen Donner follows Burton and her husband, with their five daughters, on her journey along Tamsen's path. From Tamsen's birthplace in Massachusetts to North Carolina, where she lost her first family in the space of three months; to Illinois, where she married George Donner; and finally to the fateful Oregon Trail, Burton recovers one woman's compelling history through a modern-day family's adventure into realms of ultimately timeless experiences. Here Burton has for the first time collected and published together all seventeen of Tamsen's known letters.
Product Details
Price
$29.95
$27.85
Publisher
University of Nebraska Press
Publish Date
March 01, 2009
Pages
328
Dimensions
6.25 X 9.5 X 1.0 inches | 1.39 pounds
Language
English
Type
Hardcover
EAN/UPC
9780803222854
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About the Author
Gabrielle Burton (1939-2015) was a writer whose numerous projects include the film Manna from Heaven, which she wrote and produced, and the novel Heartbreak Hotel, which won Scribner's 1985 Maxwell Perkins Prize, an award for a first work of fiction. She authored a novel she imagined as Tamsen Donner's journal, Impatient with Desire: The Lost Journal of Tamsen Donner. Burton's writing has also appeared in publications such as the New York Times and the Washington Post.
Reviews
"Every great biography requires diligent research, patient investigation, historical accuracy and informed guesses. Searching for Tamsen Donner provides all that and more: Burton candidly identifies which is which. Her own experiences as a woman, a mother, a writer, a wife and a veteran second guesser inform every passage. An original and insightful rendering of a familiar legend, I absolutely loved it."-Mary Kay Blakely, author of Wake Me When It's Over
"Searching for Tamsen Donner is audaciously ambitious and utterly original. Gabrielle Burton, back in the day, was one of our country's most dedicated first-wave feminists, mother of five children, and wife to an endlessly tolerant husband. Decades ago, obsessed by the life of Tamsen Donner, Burton bundled the lot of them into a station wagon and retraced that doomed pioneer's footsteps-across our great plains and up into the treacherous mountains, where, with so many of the Donner party, Tamsen met her tragic end. This memoir combines-successfully!-domestic, historic, and mystical concerns that bind together our brave but heartbreakingly fragile nation. It's just a terrific read."-Carolyn See, author of Making a Literary Life
?Searching for Tamsen Donner is audaciously ambitious and utterly original. Gabrielle Burton, back in the day, was one of our country's most dedicated first-wave feminists, mother of five children, and wife to an endlessly tolerant husband. Decades ago, obsessed by the life of Tamsen Donner, Burton bundled the lot of them into a station wagon and retraced that doomed pioneer's footsteps?across our great plains and up into the treacherous mountains, where, with so many of the Donner party, Tamsen met her tragic end. This memoir combines?successfully!?domestic, historic, and mystical concerns that bind together our brave but heartbreakingly fragile nation. It's just a terrific read. Carolyn See, author of Making a Literary Life -- Carolyn See (08/11/2008)
"History lesson, memoir and intimate family portrait all at once, Searching for Tamsen Donner simultaneously re-creates the 1840s and the 1970s, east to west. . . . As dramatic and tragic as the story of the Donner Party is, it shares space here with the tender reflections of a mother of five daughters-daughters whose filial companionship on a summer road trip long ago bespoke a very different kind of family journey across the American West." -- William Deverell "Los Angeles Times Book Review" (03/22/2009)
"Arriving just in time for summer road trip planning, Searching for Tamsen Donner is a moving exploration of a legendary American woman through the eyes of a modern heroine." -- Barbara Smith "Feminist Review" (04/23/2009)
"This is, of course, as much Gabrielle Burton's story as it is that of Tamsen Donner, and as such captures the reader early with its sincerity and idealism, and, indeed, its obsession." -- Charles Stephen "Lincoln Journal Star" (06/14/2009)
"Author Gabrielle Burton has created a solid work of history that manages to be a wonderful, touching personal memoir as well." -- Martin Zimmerman "San Diego Union Tribune" (05/24/2009)
"[Searching for Tamsen Donner] is a thoughtful and engaging blend of history and memoir that inspires the reader to delve further into the Donner party''s fate, while at the same time enjoying Burton''s struggle to be both a full-time mother and successful writer." -- Deborah Donovan "Booklist Online" (02/17/2009)
"[Burton] succeeds where other historians and biographers have failed in uncovering and publishing here all 17 of Donner''s known letters from the journey. . . . Burton''s curiosity to speculate and piece together clues as to circumstances surrounding Tamsen''s fate . . . drives the narrative forward as if Burton''s own perceived vulnerabilities somehow implicate her in the tragedy. It''s the book''s final uncoupling of these two parallel lives that is Tamsen Donner''s legacy to pioneering woman and Burton''s literary triumph."-R. D. Pohl, Buffalo News -- R. D. Pohl "Buffalo News" (03/29/2009)
"This is, of course, as much Gabrielle Burton''s story as it is that of Tamsen Donner, and as such captures the reader early with its sincerity and idealism, and, indeed, its obsession." -- Charles Stephen "Lincoln Journal Star" (06/14/2009)
"Searching for Tamsen Donner is audaciously ambitious and utterly original. Gabrielle Burton, back in the day, was one of our country's most dedicated first-wave feminists, mother of five children, and wife to an endlessly tolerant husband. Decades ago, obsessed by the life of Tamsen Donner, Burton bundled the lot of them into a station wagon and retraced that doomed pioneer's footsteps-across our great plains and up into the treacherous mountains, where, with so many of the Donner party, Tamsen met her tragic end. This memoir combines-successfully!-domestic, historic, and mystical concerns that bind together our brave but heartbreakingly fragile nation. It's just a terrific read."-Carolyn See, author of Making a Literary Life
?Searching for Tamsen Donner is audaciously ambitious and utterly original. Gabrielle Burton, back in the day, was one of our country's most dedicated first-wave feminists, mother of five children, and wife to an endlessly tolerant husband. Decades ago, obsessed by the life of Tamsen Donner, Burton bundled the lot of them into a station wagon and retraced that doomed pioneer's footsteps?across our great plains and up into the treacherous mountains, where, with so many of the Donner party, Tamsen met her tragic end. This memoir combines?successfully!?domestic, historic, and mystical concerns that bind together our brave but heartbreakingly fragile nation. It's just a terrific read. Carolyn See, author of Making a Literary Life -- Carolyn See (08/11/2008)
"History lesson, memoir and intimate family portrait all at once, Searching for Tamsen Donner simultaneously re-creates the 1840s and the 1970s, east to west. . . . As dramatic and tragic as the story of the Donner Party is, it shares space here with the tender reflections of a mother of five daughters-daughters whose filial companionship on a summer road trip long ago bespoke a very different kind of family journey across the American West." -- William Deverell "Los Angeles Times Book Review" (03/22/2009)
"Arriving just in time for summer road trip planning, Searching for Tamsen Donner is a moving exploration of a legendary American woman through the eyes of a modern heroine." -- Barbara Smith "Feminist Review" (04/23/2009)
"This is, of course, as much Gabrielle Burton's story as it is that of Tamsen Donner, and as such captures the reader early with its sincerity and idealism, and, indeed, its obsession." -- Charles Stephen "Lincoln Journal Star" (06/14/2009)
"Author Gabrielle Burton has created a solid work of history that manages to be a wonderful, touching personal memoir as well." -- Martin Zimmerman "San Diego Union Tribune" (05/24/2009)
"[Searching for Tamsen Donner] is a thoughtful and engaging blend of history and memoir that inspires the reader to delve further into the Donner party''s fate, while at the same time enjoying Burton''s struggle to be both a full-time mother and successful writer." -- Deborah Donovan "Booklist Online" (02/17/2009)
"[Burton] succeeds where other historians and biographers have failed in uncovering and publishing here all 17 of Donner''s known letters from the journey. . . . Burton''s curiosity to speculate and piece together clues as to circumstances surrounding Tamsen''s fate . . . drives the narrative forward as if Burton''s own perceived vulnerabilities somehow implicate her in the tragedy. It''s the book''s final uncoupling of these two parallel lives that is Tamsen Donner''s legacy to pioneering woman and Burton''s literary triumph."-R. D. Pohl, Buffalo News -- R. D. Pohl "Buffalo News" (03/29/2009)
"This is, of course, as much Gabrielle Burton''s story as it is that of Tamsen Donner, and as such captures the reader early with its sincerity and idealism, and, indeed, its obsession." -- Charles Stephen "Lincoln Journal Star" (06/14/2009)
