Customer Reviews

Prairie Tale (Thorndike Biography)

5 star:		(72)
4 star:		(37)
3 star:		(21)
2 star:		(27)
1 star:		(25)

 

 

Melissa Gilbert has as many flaws as the rest of us and if you don't mind having her burst that bubble you'll get a good chuckle as she shares anecdotes involving the unbelievable behavior of some of Hollywood's familiar faces.

Melissa keeps her bumps in the road interesting and never once appears to be reaching out for pity as a means of distracting us from the unpleasantness in her life.

I would have preferred to keep her up on a pedestal but despite the revelations regarding her less than perfect behavior, the book kept my attention and moved along at a good pace. I especially enjoyed the snippy tidbits regarding Kent McCord, Valerie Harper and Sally Kirkland. I'll never be able to think of them the same again. Someone should write a comedy about the SAG meetings!

Lets hope the publicity from the book will bring Melissa back to prime time, or at least another TV movie.

This was a good summer read; you won't regret the purchase.

What can I say? I'm a SUCKER for dishy bios on the stars I grew up admiring and wanting to be. My boyfriend saw nothing but my face buried in this great book over one solid weekend.

Melissa Gilbert was one of the truly admirable teen idols back in the '70s and an extraordinarily talented actor to boot. Her story, much of what I already knew from keeping up with her Tiger Beat and People magazine interviews through the years, is incredible and this book just reminds us that what we may perceive as the audience members of someone else's supposed "perfect" life, may very well be quite the opposite.

Gilbert is honest, irreverent, hilariously funny, and even when she's "dropping names" it doesn't feel like anything except that she is grateful for knowing and working with the legends she refers to.

Michael Landon, Rob Lowe, Patty Duke.....all very important people to Melissa - the people who truly shaped her life respectively. And so many more......but it never feels pretentious or "I bet you wish you were me".....she is just 10000% REAL when revealing the ups and downs of her colorful life. And what a life. I am so glad she had the courage and moxy to put pen to paper and share it with the people who've followed her since she was the adorable little girl on "Little House."

I also hope that young, ambitious and up and coming actors read this book because Gilbert is also the picture of dedication and professionalism sans the ego that seems to follow this generation of performers.

Melissa Gilbert is an inspiration. Her life is a wonderful lesson in perseverance, loyalty, and not taking "no" for an answer when you know deep in your heart that there's a better one.

A must read!!!

Yes, I'm a HUGE Little House fan. That's why I bought this book. Although I knew from the get go that Melissa Gilbert IS NOT Laura Ingalls, I guess I had put her on a pedestal, and didn't even realize it. I imagined that all those years I spent growing up and making mistakes, that Melissa had somehow been able to avoid all that because she was immersed in the Little House world of morals and values for so long. I find that not only were we both adopted around the same year as infants, but we also had chicken pox as adults...spent lots of time seeking the wrong type of man and adoring our children that we longed for since we could remember. I guess I didn't realize that she would have flubbed up along the way too. What an eye opener for this idealistic fan! I loved her style of writing. It was an enjoyable eyeopener, however, I'm not sure if I'll ever be able to watch her first love scenes with "Almonzo" the same way again! Is that good or bad, I'm not sure. Some times I think some things are better off left unsaid. I'm not sure I needed to know lots of things I now know about her personal life, however, I admire her ability to share herself so intimately. I could never open up like that. She is obviously an accomplished actress and she has come a long way professionally and personally and I wish her well in the future. No matter what she'll always be "Half Pint" to me!

Waaay too much personal information that she should have kept to herself. The overall book was poorly written. The language used was unnecessary and disappointing. This book succeeded in allowing me to lose a good deal of respect for "Half Pint". Borrow if you are curious but don't buy. I'm donating my copy to the library.

I just finished "Prairie Tale", but actually started feeling bored with Melissa's account of her life by halfway through the book. I enjoyed "Little House on the Prairie" as a television series, although I wasn't that impressed with Ms. Gilbert's acting as she grew older. I did see a few of the movies she made for television and was truly not impressed with her acting in those, nor her choices of movies. While I can understand and empathize with the difficult emotional journey of her life, I cannot relate to her egocentricity and found that that was what bored me. If she has done as much healing in her life as she claims, I doubt that she would find it appropriate nor acceptable to display how she has been victimized by named famous people. The name-dropping, the tales of others' attraction to her, and the ongoing blame became tedious early on. I detected an air of arrogance about her, in fact. She seemed to be caught up in a life of her own drama. I came away from the book thinking that her values didn't create a desire for me to get to know her better - or at all.

The only insight I gained into Melissa Gilbert's life is that she slept with anything that moved and let's not forget that every man, and I mean EVERY man, was madly in love with her! Why? We don't know! Whole fazes of her life are obliterated in this book, we don't know why she stopped talking to Michael Landon who she owed her whole career to. Very disjointed book! Seems like the whole thing was a giant pat on the back to her, inbetween feeling sorry for herself. Blaming her birth parents for all her shortcomings! Read something else!

I am exactly 2 months older than Melissa and was just getting into the Little House books when a few months later the television series came out. I was facinated from the start. I fell in love with every aspect of the show and admired the actors. I was envious of the Ingals family and even more so of Melissa and what her life must have been like. I remember wondering what the differences were between Melissa and Laura. I always loved seeing photos of Melissa in Tiger Beat and other teen publications. It was great seeing her in modern clothing and being SO 70's despite her 1800's character we knew and loved.

I immediately downloaded the book when it was available on Kindle and read it over the course of a few soaks in the jacuzzi. I was shocked to learn of all the angst and drama behind the scenes and in Melissa's life. I was surprised to learn my life parelled her's in many ways (sans the glamour of course) and I was happy to find the normalcy of it all.

I too wondered if my boobs would always be tiny (yes, they would) the love of my life lasted from 16 to 23 and besides the money and fame was almost identical to Melissa & Robs with the breaking up and getting back together and him bolting months before our wedding. The feeling of not being worthy or good enough, the betrayal of friends, family issues and acceptance of my peers. And then finally finding 'the one' who really completed me.

The hardest part for me to read was when Melissa was sitting with Michael and words were not spoken they were just comforted with one another. My father died in 2004 from Pancreatic Cancer and that ONE instance in that book brought all of it back. My father and I also sat together when I flew home to spend a few precious hours with him. I left his side knowing I'd never see him again and it ripped me in two. I never thought I'd feel that again until I read Melissa's account of her time with Mike.

I'm at a loss now. A part of me is very happy with Melissa's story. But now I can't watch a rerun of Little House or a movie on lifetime without remembering what was going on behind the scenes. I was also quite disappointed to learn that she and Melissa Sue were never friends. It was also fun to read about her relationship with "Scotty" I wish there would have been more information on Jonathon as I've always wondered what happened to him.

What a great read. Thank you Melissa, for sharing your life with us.

I don't recommend spending money on this book unless you can get it very inexpensively, like a used copy. The story moves along well enough; it is a sometimes-entertaining read. I do wish Ms. Gilbert (or her editor) had paid more attention to sentence structure and spelling. She constantly spelled actor Tom Berenger's name as Tom Berringer. She also spelled actress Lea Thompson's name as Leah Thompson. Why she did that, I don't know, but I found it irritating and disrespectful. If you mention someone's name in a written work, spell it correctly.

While I guess I was not shocked to hear that Half Pint grew up to do drugs, sex, and rock 'n roll with her contemporaries, I was saddened to learn that she was doing drugs when she was still working on Little House on the Prairie. That is just disappointing; I always thought she had something special about her, an intelligence that other actors of her day did not possess, but when so many in Hollywood succumbed to the lure of the wild life and had more money than they had sense, I guess it follows somewhat that Ms. Gilbert rode right along with them.

I grew tired of hearing about her repressed feelings all the time. Does she imagine that everyone else had an easy time growing up? Does she imagine we were all accepted and treated perfectly by our parents? No one has the perfect life. It does not exist, and her whining at age 44 is hard to stomach. I am sad that she was kept from her father's funeral; her mother did not always make the right decisions. But Melissa is completely preoccupied with herself and her feelings. I thought she was a cute kid on Little House, but I did not find her work on 'The Diary of Anne Frank' or her other television movies to be anything outstanding or inspiring. She is always Melissa Gilbert, no matter what character she tries to inhabit. I don't think she ever developed the ability to "be" someone else, and since that is pretty much the job of an actor, I am not sure she has achieved as much artistic success as she imagines she has -- business success, yes, but artistic success? -- up for debate.

She drops names like outdated coupons, and often what she shares is information the reader does not want to know. I did feel sorry for how desperate she seemed to be around the men in her life, how she felt the need to propel herself at them. I guess she was not really comfortable with herself enough to let someone nice approach her once in a while. I get the sense that, by the end of the book, she feels she has grown a lot, but other than raising kids which is hard work for anyone, I get the feeling that an insecure child wrote her story.

I get the sense that being adopted after birth, and her adopted father dying when she was 12, Melissa was desperately in search of a boyfriend and husband from age 14 on. Why did she have to write about losing her virginity or doing Rob Lowe on her mom's couch? Then she sadly kept getting back together with Rob Lowe, over 6 years, even though he cheated on her non-stop as did her first husband. She married an alcoholic after knowing him for only 6 weeks and had a baby at 24. Even though her older son was 19 when she wrote the book, she really bashes his dad in this book! I wonder how her son felt about this? I get the feeling that she was a nerdy young teen who went sex and drug/booze crazy because of being adopted. She describes in detail so many sexual encounters with Rob Lowe, Billy Idol, Don Johnson!, John Cusack, (why did she leave out Scott Baio?), Jon Tenney, and even sexual details about Bruce Boxleitner. She's bragging about all the celebrities she had sex with- why? As a mother, Melissa shouldn't have written about this (especially since the younger son was 13 when the book came out). I was wondering what Bruce Boxleitner thought of this book (sounds like Rob Lowe was the ONLY true love in her life, and not Bruce). They just announced they were getting divorced and I wonder if this book had a lot to do with it. I wish she would have written more about her time on LHOTP. Also- how come her adopted brother Jonathon (who played Willie Olsen) stopped speaking to her when he turned 18, 24 years ago? What happened with their relationship?

"PRAIRIE TALE," by Melissa Gilbert, suggests that the emphasis of this memoir would be a nostalgic account of the author's memorable performances in the classic television series "Little House on the Prairie." The title is blatantly misleading and disingenuous. While the book does indeed begin with anecdotes about the TV show, it quickly dissolves into a "tabloid-like-tell-all" account of the years following Michael Landon's masterful productions which aired for a decade, entertaining and inspiring its many followers. Ms. Gilbert, lest the reader should somehow forget, reminds us on page after page about how well she has mastered the use of "adult language" (i.e., "vulgar profanity" for many). This--along with various accounts of promiscuity, alcohol and drug abuse, and National-Enquirer-type disclosures about the intimate personal matters of others--resulted in a book which I chose to dispose of after finally completing it, laboriously and with great disappointment. This is not to question Ms. Gilbert's, or her publisher's, right to produce a book in whatever manner they choose. But the title was undoubtedly selected to attract those who admired her memorable role as "Half Pint" in the "Prairie" TV series which defined her acting career. So yes, Melissa Gilbert obviously had the right to record her memoirs as she saw fit... not unlike the right I, and many other readers, have in expressing our views as we see fit. "Little House" will forever be a classic, to be enjoyed by generations to come. This is how "Half Pint" is best remembered.