Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Pioneer Girl: The Annotated Autobiography tells the true story behind the Little House books—the young couple cut from The Long Winter because Wilder thought premarital pregnancy was inappropriate for children, the frontier kissing games, the Ingalls family’s shameful retreat east to run a hotel in Iowa. This is the real frontier, neither softened for young readers nor edited to endorse the […]
2014 is off to a very productive start. For instance, a week ago, I had no idea what a “polar vortex” was. So thanks for that, Mother Nature. After shoveling out my car in -38 degree wind chill, I even retained more than 8 of my original toes! What I’m getting at here is, […]
Other than honeydew melon and war, whining is easily the worst thing ever. I mean, complaining is bad enough, but to voice one’s grievances in the timbre of a dental drill warrants a consequence of the highest order. So when my kids start up in their mosquito voices about how unfair life is, I don’t […]
When it came to conquering uncharted territory, the Ingalls clan knew how to throw down. As pioneers in nineteenth-century America, the protagonists of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s autobiographical Little House series faced bone-chilling winters, disappearing food supplies, and prairie wolves that would happily make a meal out of little girls in calico dresses. Whatever life threw […]
You can find plenty of staged and pseudo survival shows on television these days, but when your young reader needs to get off the couch and read about true human courage against all odds, we recommend one (or all) of these ten best wilderness survival books. Full of staggering and stirring adventures, each one takes place in the […]