A biography of the author of The Little House on the Prairie series that comes to life only in the recounting of the stormy relationship between Wilder and her daughter. Those fictionalized accounts of Wilder’s turn-of-the-century girlhood on the rural frontier are accurate both in spirit and largely in fact. The first part of this biography reruns those years in numbing detail, but Miller (History/South Dakota State Univ.) picks up the pace when he begins to examine the controversy about who really wrote the series, Wilder or her daughter, Rose Wilder Lane. Rose Lane was an established writer and editor living in San Francisco when she began to encourage her mother to write. Wilder and her husband were then eking out a living on a Missouri farm, and Rose saw her mother’s writing as a potential source of income. Wilder began with a series of columns for a local newspaper and finally a manuscript of reminiscence. By then, Rose was living on the Missouri farm and worked closely with her mother to get the book in shape. Rose continued to manage and guide both Wilder’s career and subsequent manuscripts’so closely, some critics have said, that they were really Rose’s books. Drawing on correspondence between mother and daughter and other sources, Miller concludes that Wilder was a talented writer in her own right and that her daughter acted as a skilled editor and writing coach, although rewriting limited sections of her mother’s work. Wilder was 65 years old when her first book was published in 1932, 90 when she died, already a favorite of several generations of children. Her daughter died a few years later. Rose emerges as a conflicted and intriguing character, but this biography remains best suited for historians and adults who are still hard-core Wilder fans. (20 illustrations)
Pub Date: May 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-8262-1167-4
Page Count: 312
Publisher: Univ. of Missouri
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1998
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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