A vivid portrait of frontier life and one of its most ardent celebrants.
A sensitive biography of the author of Little House on the Prairie.
Many books about Laura Ingalls Wilder (1867-1957) have stirred up controversy about her writing career and political views. William Holtz’s The Ghost in the Little House (1993) ascribes considerable authorship to Wilder’s daughter, Rose Wilder Lane; Christine Woodside’s Libertarians on the Prairie (2016) presents compelling evidence for Wilder’s ultraconservatism. Fraser (Rewilding the World: Dispatches from the Conservation Revolution, 2009, etc.), editor of the Library of America edition of the Little House books, offers a cleareyed and well-documented examination of Wilder’s life, writings, and career; her relationship with Rose; and her politics. Deeply respectful of Wilder as a writer, she deems Little House on the Prairie “a classic work” and “a cultural monument” that, although fiction, tells “the truth about settlement, about homesteading,” and about farmers’ “astonishing feats of survival,” which Wilder experienced firsthand. As a child, she was “constantly uprooted and often imperiled”; married at 18, she faced years of “exhaustion, failure, and regret.” After her husband was crippled in an accident, compromising his ability to farm, Wilder, in addition to farm work, took odd jobs. When Rose, a journalist, suggested publishing as a way to make money, Wilder eagerly recorded memories of prairie life. Rose served as editor. Fraser portrays the domineering Rose as erratic, angry, depressive, and self-destructive, repeatedly causing “ruination to herself, bringing her life down around her ears.” She compulsively poured money into house renovations and lavish travel, often leaving herself destitute. Like her mother, she was adamantly opposed to Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal; she was anti-Semitic, “an apologist for dictatorial regimes,” and a champion of Ayn Rand’s work. The literary collaboration between mother and daughter was “a competition” between “Wilder’s plain, unadorned, fact-based approach versus Lane’s polished, dramatic, and fictionalized one. In Wilder’s autobiographical work, ‘truth’ would become a battlefield.” What emerged was a nostalgic life story, “reimagined as an American tale of progress,” that catapulted Wilder to fame.
A vivid portrait of frontier life and one of its most ardent celebrants.Pub Date: Nov. 21, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-62779-276-9
Page Count: 640
Publisher: Metropolitan/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Aug. 20, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.
The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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