The "meat" of a good read is in the storytelling...even if it's about The Donner Party.

Over the last days, I haven't had tons of time for my latest cast-on because I've had my head stuck in the pages of Desperate Passage: The Donner Party's Perilous Journey West by Ethan Rarick ever since it landed on my doorstep yesterday morning.And might I say, as Boston readies, and begins, this heinous winter blast, with wind chills causing temps to dip below zero degrees and the wind outside my place just howling like crazy, it makes perfect sense to read about an 1846 wagon train stuck in the wintery mountains with no provision to last to the great thaw, thus the Donner Party and everything it entrails....excuse, I mean entails.Desperate Passage is a recent release and I have no idea what brought on the need to immediately read something Donner Party related, but it had been festering for as many weeks and I finally hunkered down and ordered the book. But man if it didn't take billions of days to get here--just as the Donner Party thought it would never make it to California, I too, thought this tome would never grace my front terrace.This is honestly worth hunkering down for--it isn't incredibly weighty with tons of footnotes (like Leviathan: A History of Whaling in America), but its rich in history and the storytelling flows like a novel but with more fact and loads of use of archival material, particularly letters written by members of the Donner Party, including children who suffered innumerable tragedy in those frosty mountain climes.If you're looking for a book to just get lost in, snuggle up and pick this one. Unless you are squeamish about uh, cannibalism. At least they didn't "draw lots"...File Under: Brace for the Boston cold with a good book, rather than a frozen body of flesh? Perchaps.