A book for die-hard Little House fans.
How a champion of Ayn Rand shaped the Little House series.
Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House books are a publishing phenomenon, with about 60 million copies sold since their inception in 1932. Journalist and editor Woodside (Energy Independence: Your Everyday Guide to Reducing Fuel Consumption, 2008, etc.) was among many young readers obsessed with the series and its author: “an urge to know the real Laura gripped me,” writes the author, who for 40 years read everything she could find about her. Among those books was William Holtz’s The Ghost in the Little House (1993), a biography of Rose Wilder Lane, Laura’s daughter, which revealed that Rose “was a very important quiet partner” in writing the series, which she informed with her conservative political views. His disclosure met with anger from Laura’s fans, exhibited in such acts as anonymous phone calls berating him for sullying Laura’s reputation. Wilder historian William Anderson published scholarly articles drawing the same conclusion. Woodside has examined family papers that support those findings. Although she elaborates on both points, she does not offer a substantially new view of either woman, and it’s likely that readers are already aware that the books idealized prairie life and the fortitude of the pioneers. Rose was a successful journalist, novelist, and biographer (of Charlie Chaplin, Henry Ford, and Herbert Hoover) by the time she began work on her mother’s story. She had a literary agent and strong publishing connections, but, as Woodside reiterates, although she was well-paid, she was always in debt. The Little House series, she believed, would fill her depleted bank account. The collaboration, however, exacerbated a difficult relationship. As Woodside portrays her, Rose was unhappy, often depressed, and envious of her mother’s increasing fame. The two, though, shared a hatred of Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal, looked for ways to avoid paying income taxes, and frequently extolled the virtues of capitalism.
A book for die-hard Little House fans.Pub Date: Sept. 6, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-62872-656-5
Page Count: 312
Publisher: Arcade
Review Posted Online: June 20, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2016
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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