‘Never Take No Cutoffs’

Roman slave and poet-playwright Terence famously wrote in his 163 B.C. play  Heauton Timorumenos, “Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto,” or “I am human, and I think that nothing of that which is human is alien to me.” Anyone who reads Michael Wallis’s The Best Land Under Heaven: The Donner Party in the Age of Manifest Destiny (Liveright, $27.95), might consider concurrently contemplating Terence’s poignant summation of the human condition across the millennia. Wallis opens his