laura ingalls wilder's life story: the 8-track
Laura Ingalls Wilder: A photographic story of a life, by Tanya Lee Stone

Laura Ingalls Wilder's life story is the stuff that novels are made of. While her homesteader family moved across the American frontier, young Laura took it all in with a keen eye for scenes and characters, and a frank and friendly disposition that won her friends in every new town. A natural storyteller, Laura later entertained her daughter with tales from her childhood.

Those same stories would develop into the Little House novels, enjoyed by generations of Americans. Her books were fiction... but the true story of Laura's life is just as amazing...

More than 100 photographs show famous figures in living color... Sidebars offer in-depth historical context... A visual timeline tells the story at a glance...

This is such a beautiful book. It's a cute size. There's a photograph or two on every page, and the text weaves around and about. There are little boxes and blurbs to catch your attention. There's just enough color along with the greens and blues and browns suggestive of the prairie. As soon as I received this LIW bio in the mail, I started emailing people and saying they really ought to buy it too. It's laid out so well and it's so pretty, I said.

Then I read it. While there's nothing that the casual Laura Ingalls Wilder fan might pick up on, a something or two still niggles at me from every page. After reading it through a second and a third time, I think I know what bothers me. I simply don't feel like the author was comfortable with her material. Does she even love Laura Ingalls Wilder?

There are plenty of citations and a bibliography; it's paragraph after paragraph that comes from another biography. But the problem is that while a lot of the Stone biography obviously references Laura Ingalls Wilder's Pioneer Girl manuscript, it's not cited or even listed in the bibliography (nor are any of the "Little House" books except for On the Way Home and Little House Traveler). For someone who quoted Pioneer Girl so heavily, did she even read it for herself?

If you've read Zochert's LIW bio (and who hasn't?), you know that he relied heavily on Pioneer Girl for "facts". Well, Stone relies heavily on Zochert, and even heavier on Pamela Smith Hill's Laura Ingalls Wilder: A Writer's Life. And where Stone credits Smith Hill, Smith Hill might in turn credit Ann Romines, who might have credited William Anderson. Sometimes I think it might be possible to get a stack of LIW bios and follow the "citation circle" in a big old 8-track loop in which everybody quotes everybody else but never has any primary research of their own to report. Isn't it time to stop and figure out "who said it first" and check for holes in our LIW common knowledge?

How do you rate LIW bios, anyway? One corn, two corns, three corns? This one is so pretty, I'd be tempted to give it four corns anyway. Too bad that "four don't go fur."
- posted by pioneergirl at 10:30 PM