Desperate Passage
Title | Desperate Passage PDF eBook |
Author | Ethan Rarick |
Publisher | Oxford University Press |
Total Pages | 304 |
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.
Desperate Passage
Title | Desperate Passage PDF eBook |
Author | Ethan Rarick |
Publisher | Oxford University Press |
Total Pages | 304 |
Release | 2008-02-04 |
Genre | History |
ISBN | 9780199756704 |
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.
Desperate Passage
Title | Desperate Passage PDF eBook |
Author | Don Pendleton |
Publisher | Gold Eagle |
Total Pages | 188 |
Release | 2008-10-01 |
Genre | Fiction |
ISBN | 1426823223 |
Corruption in the Indonesian government reaches new heights when a top-level official sanctions a thriving piracy ring in the region. The profits are helping to fund a new bioterrorism weapon that will ultimately be used against America. When the U.S. State Department officials who unearthed evidence of the whole scheme disappear, Mack Bolan is sent to find them. But Bolan is ambushed by a group of commandos at his drop zone in the mountains outside Jakarta. Protecting a covert jungle stronghold, the mercenaries are desperate to keep the true extent of their activities hidden. A team of assassins is lying in wait and the Executioner must stop them with a hit of his own.
Desperate Passage
Title | Desperate Passage PDF eBook |
Author | Ethan Rarick |
Publisher | Oxford University Press |
Total Pages | 305 |
Release | 2009-07 |
Genre | History |
ISBN | 0195383311 |
Drawing on fresh archeological 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--ninety pioneers who became stranded in the Sierra Nevada mountains in the winter of 1846-47-- and their unimaginable ordeal.
Istanbul Passage
Title | Istanbul Passage PDF eBook |
Author | Joseph Kanon |
Publisher | Simon and Schuster |
Total Pages | 432 |
Release | 2013-04-16 |
Genre | Fiction |
ISBN | 1439156433 |
In 1945 Istanbul, American undercover agent Leon Bauer's attempt to save a life leads to a desperate manhunt, a game of shifting loyalties, and an unexpected love affair.
Desperate Characters
Title | Desperate Characters PDF eBook |
Author | Paula Fox |
Publisher | W. W. Norton & Company |
Total Pages | 180 |
Release | 1999 |
Genre | Fiction |
ISBN | 9780393318944 |
First published in 1970 to great acclaim, this novel stands as one of the most dazzling and rigorous examples of the storyteller's craft in postwar American literature--a novel that, according to Irving Howe, ranks with "Billy Budd" and "The Great Gatsby".
Middle Passage
Title | Middle Passage PDF eBook |
Author | Charles Johnson |
Publisher | Simon and Schuster |
Total Pages | 229 |
Release | 2012-02-21 |
Genre | Fiction |
ISBN | 1439125031 |
A twenty-fifth anniversary edition of Charles Johnson’s National Book Award-winning masterpiece—"a novel in the tradition of Billy Budd and Moby-Dick…heroic in proportion…fiction that hooks the mind" (The New York Times Book Review)—now with a new introduction from Stanley Crouch. Rutherford Calhoun, a newly freed slave and irrepressible rogue, is lost in the underworld of 1830s New Orleans. Desperate to escape the city’s unscrupulous bill collectors and the pawing hands of a schoolteacher hellbent on marrying him, he jumps aboard the Republic, a slave ship en route to collect members of a legendary African tribe, the Allmuseri. Thus begins a voyage of metaphysical horror and human atrocity, a journey which challenges our notions of freedom, fate and how we live together. Peopled with vivid and unforgettable characters, nimble in its interplay of comedy and serious ideas, this dazzling modern classic is a perfect blend of the picaresque tale, historical romance, sea yarn, slave narrative and philosophical allegory. Now with a new introduction from renowned writer and critic Stanley Crouch, this twenty-fifth anniversary edition of Middle Passage celebrates a cornerstone of the American canon and the masterwork of one of its most important writers. "Long after we’d stopped believe in the great American novel, along comes a spellbinding adventure story that may be just that" (Chicago Tribune).