NPR listeners and UNP fans, be sure to tune in to Fresh Air this evening to hear book critic Maureen Corrigan’s rave review of Gabrielle Burton’s memoir/biography, Searching for Tamsen Donner, published last year by the University of Nebraska Press.

In the review, which also highlights Burton’s novel about Donner Party matriarch Tamsen Donner, titled Impatient with Desire, Corrigan calls Searching for Tamsen Donner “extraordinary” and a “must read.” Pretty high praise from one of this blogger's favorite radio programs.  A short excerpt from the review follows:

Burton writes about a shoestring-budget trip she took in 1977, along with her husband and five daughters all crammed into the family station wagon. Already deep into Donner research, Burton wanted to trace the party's route from Illinois to California. Originally, Burton, newly fired up by the women's liberation movement, had planned to make the pilgrimage alone, on a cherry-red motorcycle; but, being a small woman, she couldn't control the heavy bike. And so begins an unforgettable feminist family-on-the-road saga the likes of which I've never read before. The Burton family stops at lonely pioneer graves off highways and swims in the Great Salt Lake, and all the while, fledgling writer Gabrielle is making daily calculations about how to fulfill her responsibilities as a wife and mother, without (like Tamsen Donner) discovering all too late that "her duty had cost her her life." As Burton wisely says, talking about emotional cannibalism: "The nicest husbands and children will eat you up alive if you offer yourself on the plate, and they'll ask for seconds."

Corrigan's review, like the book itself, makes me want to take a summertime research road-trip. Bonus: UNP and its American Lives series gets a nice little shout-out in the review, as well. I can’t wait to tune in this evening. If you’d like to listen online, text and audio versions of the review are on the Fresh Air Web site.