Wandering Along the Path: Right Speech

I'm reading a pretty amazing biography of Laura Ingalls Wilder by Caroline Fraser, called Prairie Fires.  It's riveting reading and encompasses so much history I did not know.  I never read the Little House books as a kid, but some of my kids did, and we sometimes watched the TV show, but my son and daughter-in-law gave me the book for my birthday, knowing how much I like biographies.  This bio is so detailed, well researched and well written that not having a stake in Wilder doesn't matter.  It's the lives depicted, and the eras, that come to life vividly.  Years ago my husband, kids and I saw a sod house in South Dakota that I thought gave me an idea of that long ago pioneering spirit, but I really had no clue as to who these adventurers were, what circumstances they faced (economic depressions, fires, depletion of soil, illegal squatting on Indian land) and what the politics of the time meant in terms of the poor.  Wilder romanticized her past, but Fraser has brought it back in all its complexity and in the context of capitalism, and the damage it did and still does to citizens of our country.  Lots of lessons to be learned reading this book, that's for sure.