Serendipity led me to this review by Maurice McDonell at ePinions.com, to wit: "Betty MacDonald appreciated the primitive frontier life by experiencing it after being raised in a modestly successful family. And, she did not spare the reader the unsavory truths about people who have done some 'backsliding'. I can say that, after seeing the Bicentennial Celebration reenactments at Washington D.C. in 1976, those well-intentioned people had not the slightest idea how to represent conditions on the frontier, whether in upstate New York in 1812, in Mississippi in 1864, or on the Olympic Peninsula in the 1920's. It is too unpleasant to contemplate."

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