This is some great storytelling. A history book this well-researched is often rendered dryly academic with the laying out of facts, but Ethan Rarick has a gift for making the story come alive. He's like a favorite uncle that comes home every so often and keeps the whole family up past their bedtimes with a harrowing tale to tell.
With impressive insight, he gives you a feel for individual personalities and the collective psychology of wagon train groups. He makes palpable the physical experience of walking 2000 miles in 1846--the dust, the clothes, the food, the weather, the sights, the pace, the squabbles--you get a good picture of the nuts and bolts of life on the trail. Likewise, the details of their winter entrapment are equally vivid, and horrible in their immediacy. You experience the dark and feel the cold and sense the mounting desperation.
Rarick sets the story of this one group, quite deftly, into the layered social and political contexts of westward expansion, so you get a really interesting history lesson without even realizing it. He's a master of timing and the well-placed quote, and manages to appropriately employ an understated humor at times, all of which make for a highly readable book.
On a practical note, another aspect which enhances this book's readability is the decision to forgo footnotes or endnotes with those
floating numbers scattered so distractingly throughout the text. The sources are referenced in the back of the book by chapter and page and a perusal of these sources is interesting in itself, both for a look at the extent of the sources and a glimpse into the author's decision making process.
I hope we hear from Mr. Rarick again soon.
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Desperate Passage: The Donner Party's Perilous Journey West Books In Print, Audio Books.