Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder

I was a serious Little House fan as a kid, rereading the books regularly, and I've read other bios of Wilder, but I learned things I never knew and made connections to American history that fill in the blanks left by Wilder's fictionalization of her life.

Rose and Laura's anti-New Deal fanaticism was especially fascinating and outrageously hypocritical. A family whose livelihood came from free land stolen from indigenous people by the US government has a lot of nerve to criticize desperate people seeking relief during the depression. The connection of the Dust Bowl back to the destructive farming practices of homesteaders ads another layer of hypocrisy on to their obsessive opposition to collective social solutions to public crises.

Also, Rose was quite a piece of work, more than other bios have ever let on.