NY Times 10 Best Books: Go, Caroline!
Of the list, the one I’d most like to read is “Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder” by my former New Yorker fact-checking colleague, Caroline Fraser. The Times says: ‘Fraser’s biography of the author of “Little House on the Prairie†and other beloved books about her childhood during the era of westward migration captures the details of a life — and an improbable, iconic literary career — that has been expertly veiled by fiction. Exhaustively researched and passionately written, this book refreshes and revitalizes our understanding of Western American history, giving space to the stories of Native Americans displaced from the tribal lands by white settlers like the Ingalls family as well as to the travails of homesteaders, farmers and everyone else who rushed to the West to extract its often elusive riches. Ending with a savvy analysis of the 20th-century turn toward right-wing politics taken by Wilder and her daughter, Rose Wilder Lane, Fraser offers a remarkably wide-angle view of how national myths are shaped.’
