Impatient With Desire Pre-Pub Book Club Broadcast #3 with Gabrielle Burton

Official publication date broadcast of the Impatient With Desire Pre-Publication Book Club on Rare Bird Radio (now to be referred to as, simply, the Impatient With Desire Book Club), featuring IWD author Gabrielle Burton and guest callers from the IWD Pre-Pub Book Club currently moderated on Goodreads.com. For more info on joining the IWD PP Book Club, please email us directly at info@rarebirdlit.com or call 213.623.1773. ABOUT THE BOOK Gabrielle Burton's Impatient with Desire is a beautifully written fictional account of the Donner party's epic journey of 1846. It is a journey whose tragic and gruesome finale is familiar to most Americans. Burton uses years of solid research and a disciplined imagination to fill in the less sensational but still moving details of the trip that began in Illinois and ended in the snow-bound Sierra Nevada. Burton gives us a flesh and blood Tamsen Donner, brave, independent, kind, and determined to make her way west both for the adventure of it all and for the advantages she was sure awaited her family in California. The party of George Donner, Tamsen, their five children, and eighty other pioneers traveled by wagon going west across miles of meadows, mountains, and deserts. Tamsen's journal entries and letters to her sister back east, imagined by Burton, describe the journey west in all its hardships and its pleasures. Although only two of Tamsen's letters while on the trail still exist and her journal was never recovered, Burton uses the facts she does have to evoke the heart and soul of Tamsen, and to record her motivations in beginning the trip, her delights in the journey, and her heroism in the snows of Truckee Meadows. Tamsen kept her five children alive and sane through a regimen of hygiene, chores, and meals (only at the very end was human meat prepared and then it was only for the youngest of the group).