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Becoming Laura Ingalls Wilder
I read Becoming Laura Ingalls Wilder: The Woman Behind the Legend for the first time in the fall of 2007. My daughters and I had been exploring the earlier Little House books for…
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Defending Laura
The renaming of the “Laura Ingalls Wilder Award” as the “Children’s Literature Legacy Award” seems shockingly misguided. It coincides with my reading of Prairie Fires by Caroline Fraser, a biography of Wilder that…
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The Wilder Life
I picked up The Wilder Life: My Adventures in the Lost World of Little House on the Prairie at a publisher’s book sale that comes to our area once a year. It has one…
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Keep history honest. Please.
I read a hilarious satire on the rewriting of Roald Dahl’s language in new editions of his books. The article, titled “A Modest Proposal for Revisionist Gothic Literary Thoughtcrimes Against Wokespeak,” offers revisions…
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Recent Reading: 6 Books
It’s tough to recall what all I’ve read since April, when I last posted on books. I’ll begin with Hollowed Out: A Warning about America’s Next Generation, by Jeremy S. Adams. Written by…
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Prairie Fires
Carolyn Fraser’s Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder won a Pulitzer in 2017. Little wonder. I’ve spent the past few weeks savoring it not just for its fascinating content, but…
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Go Set a Watchman
Go Set a Watchman, Harper Lee’s recently published second novel about the community made famous in To Kill a Mockingbird, is largely a disappointment. The book is a sequel in the sense that…
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Pioneer Girl
So you feel like you’ve lived an interesting life, maybe a life that illustrates one of the archetypal American themes — Manifest Destiny, for example. How do you go about writing your life…
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A Little House Traveler
I picked up A Little House Traveler by chance on the juvenile biography shelf last week. Barbara at Stray Thoughts hosts a Laura Ingalls Wilder Challenge this month, and when I saw this…
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Caddie Woodlawn
It took us a long time to read Caddie Woodlawn. But we never lost the thread, and our interest never waned. I enjoyed this book when I was a child, and I enjoyed…
