Laura Ingalls Wilder Has A New Book Out?

Hold that mail buggy! The woman who died in 1957 has a new book? Well, yes indeed, she does! That is, if "new" means previously unpublished.

The South Dakota Historical Society Press recently put out Pioneer Girl: The Annotated Autobiography, Wilder's autobiography that has been languishing on some archive's shelf since the 1930s. Judging by the fact that the book has been sold out for weeks on Amazon, Wilder still captures the American imagination. If you're anything like me, you know all her books nearly by heart and consider them a formative component of your childhood and young adulthood. (Sidenote: I have lobbied unsuccessfully for years to name a dog Almanzo.) 

This armful of a book gives more information than you ever thought you wanted to know about Wilder's life and her progression as a writer. There has long been a rumor floating about that Wilder's daughter, the then-famous writer Rose Wilder Lane, actually did most of the writing in the Little House books. Pioneer Girl effectively disproves this notion, demonstrating that while Lane contributed significantly to the books' creation by acting as her mother's editor and primary sounding board, the work belongs to Wilder. Really, if anything, Lane can be accused of recycling her mother's stories in some of her successful novels (e.g., The Young Pioneers).

While the actual text of Pioneer Girl offers only a rough sketch of Wilder's youth (albeit with the inclusion of some very adult situations), the annotations fill in many gaps and round out the life in letters of one of our most beloved literary voices. Give it a shot, if you're able to carry it out of the library!

The jazz baroness

“He was a good-looking cat,” said Toot Monk. “She was a hotty.”

He was talking about his father, Thelonious Monk, and Pannonica de Koenigswarter. Her nickname was Nica, and her maiden name was Rothschild. She was white, British, Jewish, rich, and married, and she was the great jazzman’s closest companion for the last half of his life.

I learned about the fascinating Nica and her relationship with Monk in The Baroness: The Search for Nica, the Rebellious Rothschild. This biography was written by Nica’s great-niece, Hannah Rothschild, who (like Nica) struggled against the expectations that come along with that illustrious name.

Nica and her sisters, Miriam and Liberty, were raised in surroundings of extraordinary wealth, rigid rules, and emotional neglect.  Their educations were limited and their expectations severely circumscribed. As women, they would never, ever, work at the Rothschild family business. So what would they do? No one really seemed to know or care.

Miriam became a brilliant and influential entomologist, and Liberty suffered from mental illness. Nica, the beautiful youngest, married a European jet-setter, as rich beautiful young ladies did.

But by the mid-1960s, Nica had left her husband and children, and was hanging out in the Five Spot Cafe and the Village Vanguard, listening to live jazz in her fur coat and pearls.  By the mid-1970s, she was living with Thelonius Monk and two hundred cats in Weehawken, New Jersey.

The Baroness is full of amazing characters, from saxophonist Charlie Parker, who died in Nica’s apartment, to Nica’s brilliant and steely sister Miriam. It’s really one of the most interesting biographies I’ve ever read.

Do not operate machinery under the influence of this book

I had to turn off Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand. The audiobook was so exciting that I could barely concentrate on my driving. I pulled over to a safe place, and started the book playing again. Getting to my destination seemed less important than knowing what was going to happen next.

Unbroken: a World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption tells the true story of Louis Zamperini, the bombardier of a B-24 crew flying missions in the Pacific during World War II. In May of 1943, his plane went down and Louie, his pilot, and one other crewman endured a nearly two-thousand mile ordeal in an open raft on the Pacific. They staved off starvation, thirst, madness, sharks, and strafing from a Japanese plane. Eventually, the crewman died; on the forty-seventh day after the crash, Louie and his pilot drifted into the Marshall Islands and were taken prisoner by the Japanese.

Though it is a work of nonfiction, this book is extraordinarily suspenseful. Hillenbrand's descriptions of air battles are exhilarating; her insights into the relationship between prisoners and guards are thought-provoking. Zamperini's experiences were nothing short of amazing.

Perhaps because we are again a nation at war, stories like this one - of courage and defiance during wartime - are especially resonant. Click here to put a hold on the book; and if you choose the audiobook, remember to keep your eyes on the road.

Vol de Nuit

Antoine de Saint-Exupery is best known in this country for The Little Prince, the odd, sad children's book he wrote during World War II. He was a fascinating person and a wonderful writer, and in my opinion his adult books are well worth discovering. 

His 1931 novel Night Flight vividly describes the experience of piloting an unpressurized airplane through unpredictable weather and over unknown terrain, with few instruments. The novel focuses upon the emotions of Rivière, an Aéropostale manager, when one of his pilots fails to return. 

Saint-Exupéry wrote from experience. Born into an impoverished family of French nobility in 1900, Saint-Exupéry came of age after World War I. He went to work for Aéropostale, an aviation company that contracted to deliver mail using the dangerous new technology of flight. A pioneer of early aviation, he survived numerous mishaps, including a near-fatal 1935 crash in the Libyan desert. 

During World War II he joined the French Free Forces as a pilot, even though he was much older than the other fliers and was unfamiliar with the more technologically-advanced aircraft of the 1940s. Saint-Exupéry's plane disappeared over the Mediterranean in July of 1944; the wreckage was only discovered in 2000. 

As Saint-Exupery's life was even more fascinating than his books, I also recommend the excellent biography, Saint-Exupéry, by Stacy Schiff.