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Biography & Autobiography.
Sociology.
Nonfiction.
HTML:*Finalist for the National Book Award* *Finalist for the Kirkus Prize* *Instant New York Times Bestseller* *Named a Best Book of the Year by NPR, New York Post, BuzzFeed, Shelf Awareness, Bustle, and Publishers Weekly*
An essential read for our times: an eye-opening memoir of working-class poverty in America that will deepen our understanding of the ways in which class shapes our country and "a deeply humane memoir that crackles with clarifying insight".* Sarah Smarsh was born a fifth generation Kansas wheat farmer on her paternal side, and the product of generations of teen mothers on her maternal side. Through her experiences growing up on a farm thirty miles west of Wichita, we are given a unique and essential look into the lives of poor and working class Americans living in the heartland.
During Sarah's turbulent childhood in Kansas in the 1980s and 1990s, she enjoyed the freedom of a country childhood, but observed the painful challenges of the poverty around her; untreated medical conditions for lack of insurance or consistent care, unsafe job conditions, abusive relationships, and limited resources and information that would provide for the upward mobility that is the American Dream. By telling the story of her life and the lives of the people she loves with clarity and precision but without judgement, Smarsh challenges us to look more closely at the class divide in our country.
Beautifully written, in a distinctive voice, Heartland combines personal narrative with powerful analysis and cultural commentary, challenging the myths about people thought to be less because they earn less.
"Heartland is one of a growing number of important works??including Matthew Desmond's Evicted and Amy Goldstein's Janesville??that together merit their own section in nonfiction aisles across the country: America's postindustrial decline...Smarsh shows how the false promise of the 'American dream' was used to subjugate the poor. It's a powerful mantra" *(The New York Times Book Review)… (altro)
I wanted to like this book since it deals with people and places quite familiar to me, being a native Kansan and living in Wichita for 45 years. However, I found the "baby that never was" contrived and awkward. The book rambled and seemed disorganized. The message of don't get pregnant as a teenager, don't do drugs is a good one, and it paid off for the author. That was nice to see. ( )
I bought this book because it was a National Book Award finalist, and was included in NPR's "Best Books of 2018."
It's a memoir in the style of "Hillbilly Elegy;" a woman overcomes her difficult and impoverished upbringing in the Plains States to become a successful writer and evolved individual. It's more of a family history; an unflattering story told here, then another unflattering story told there. Very similar to "Hillbilly Elegy" (which I did not enjoy reading either).
It is written as if told to an unborn ( even unconceived) child the author might have had (could have had) as a teen. I initially thought this was an imaginative and interesting angle, but honestly this takes up only a small portion of the book. IMHO she might have developed this angle further, or just left it out entirely.
The book is a personal, decades-long story of America’s coordinated assault on its underclass.... Thanks to persistent false narratives about poverty, families like mine and Smarsh’s — perhaps yours too — wasted generations believing in “trickle down” economics, leaving us “standing outside with our mouths open praying for money to rain.” Ultimately, we concluded that “the American Dream has a price tag on it,” and “the poorer you are, the higher the price.”
Part memories, part economic analysis, part sociological treatise, Heartland ties together various threads of American society of the last 40 years ... Smarsh’s book is persuasive not only for the facts she marshals, but also because of the way she expresses it ... she uses minute detail to get across the tenuous state of the lives of her family ... in her silent speeches to a never-born child, Smarsh spells out clearly what she has gained, what she has had to leave behind and the cost for both.
...the book circumambulates several major themes: body, land, shame. Smarsh describes the toll of labor on those who have no choice but to do it — a work force priced out of health insurance by its privatization. Neighbors are maimed by combines and the author’s father nearly dies from chemical poisoning a week into a job transporting used cleaning solvent. Women absorb their husbands’ frustrations, blow by blow. Meanwhile, big agribusinesses strangle the region’s family farms, leaving behind a brackish residue of shame — the shame of being poor and white.
It is through education that Smarsh is able to avoid their fate; but while hers is a happy ending, she is still haunted by the fact that being poor is associated with being bad. Smarsh’s raw and intimate narrative exposes a country of economic inequality that “has failed its children.”
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For Mom
Incipit
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I heard a voice unlike the ones in my house or on the news that told me my place in the world.
Citazioni
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It’s funny that both their children were born weeks before an election that Reagan won. We would be able to map our lives against the destruction of the working class: the demise of the family farm, the dismantling of public health, the defunding of public schools, wages so stagnant that full-time workers could no longer pay the bills. Historic wealth inequality was old news to us by the time it hit the newspapers in the new millennium. (Chapter 1: “A Penny in a Purse”)
How can you talk about the poor child without addressing the country that let her be so? It's a relatively new way of thinking for me. I was raised to put all responsibility on the individual, on bootstraps with which she ought pull herself up. But it's the way of things that environment changes outcomes.
Or to put it in my first language: The crop depends on the weather, dudnit? A good seed 'll do 'er job 'n' sprout, but come hail 'n' you're plumb outta luck, regardless. (“Dear August,” p. 3, Scribner (2018))
When I found your name, in my early adulthood, I don't think I'd ever heard the term “white working class.” The experience it describes includes both racial privilege and economic disadvantage, which can exist simultaneously. This was an obvious, apolitical for those of us who lived in that juxtaposition every day. But it seemed to make people uneasy, as though our grievance put us in competition with poor people of other races. Wealthy white people, in particular, seemed to want to distance themselves from our place and our truth. Our struggles forced a question about America that many were not willing to face: If a person could go to work every day and still not be able to pay the bills and the reason wasn't racism, what less articulated problem was afoot. (“A Penny in a Purse,” p. 13-14, Scribner (2018))
When I was growing up, the United States had convinced itself that class didn't exist here. […] This lack of acknowledgement at once invalidated what we were experiencing and shamed us if we tried to express it. Class was not discussed, let alone understood. […] The defining feeling of childhood was that of being told that there wasn't a problem when I knew damn well there was. (“A Penny in a Purse,” p. 14, Scribner (2018), elisions added)
We were “below the poverty line” I'd later understand – distasteful to to better-off whites, I think, for having failed economically in the context of their own race. And we were of a place, the Great Plains, spurned by more powerful corners of the country as a monolithic cultural waste land. “Flyover country,” people called it, like walking there might be dangerous. Its people were “backwards,” “rednecks,” maybe even “trash.” (“A Penny in a Purse,” p. 14 - 15, Scribner (2018))
Every kid in our family moved more times than they could remember without getting out a pen and a notepad. If you're wild enough to enjoy it – poverty can contain a certain freedom – no careers or properties to maintain, no community meetings or social status to be responsible to. If there was a car that ran and a bit of gas money, we could just leave. (“A Penny in a Purse,” p. 16, Scribner (2018))
Sometimes it's a worthwhile gamble for the poor to drift. Having no money looks and feels different in different places. […] Among the poor, the risks of starting over are more severe for women, people of color, and other disadvantaged groups. But often, by moving, there is little to lose and at least a chance of finding something better. (“A Penny in a Purse,” p. 16, Scribner (2018) [elisions added])
So much of childhood amounts to being awake in a grown-up's nightmare. Ours happened to be about poverty, which comes with not just psychological dangers but mortal ones, too. (“The Body of a Poor Girl,” p. 71, Scribner (2018))
So much of childhood amounts to being awake in a grown-up's nightmare. Ours happened to be about poverty, which comes with not just psychological dangers but mortal ones, too. (“The Body of a Poor Girl,” p. 71, Scribner (2018))
My childhood happened to coincide with the moment health insurance and drug companies veritably merged with the nation's for-profit hospital system, creating costs that were prohibitive for uninsured families like ours. (“The Body of a Poor Girl,” p. 71, Scribner (2018))
To make a health concern seem better, we told ourselves that we didn't need doctors. But the truth was that we couldn't afford them. If you had a real health emergency, you were liable to be dead before some small town's ambulance made it down the muddy, sandy ruts of our dirt roads. But a decade old dropper of stinging red iodine would fix most cuts, so we went on like everything was fine. (“The Body of a Poor Girl,” p. 71, Scribner (2018))
By the time I was born, rural hospitals were closing and American health care had transformed into a slick, big business in urban centers. (“The Body of a Poor Girl,” p. 71, Scribner (2018))
As an infant, one night I came down with a dangerously high fever. My parents rushed me miles along bumpy roads to the rural home of Joseph Stech, a small town doctor who still sometimes made house calls. [. . . A]s I was rowing up, he was still charging a modest fee for a visit to his nineteenth century office on Main Street in nearby Andale. He gave me all my immunization shots and prescribed penicillin when I got strep throat.
[. . .] No one remember what Dr. Stech did to save me. For my family, the more important takeaway was that I just wasn't meant to die that night. (“The Body of a Poor Girl,” p. 72, Scribner (2018)) [elisions added]
But a few years down the road, people like us would face health epidemics that cried for professional care: obesity, diabetes, methamphetamine addiction, sepsis from what we called a “bad tooth” with infection at the root, abuse of opioids prescribed by the same doctors who were supposed to help. (“The Body of a Poor Girl,” p. 73, Scribner (2018))
By then, the same forces of privatization [. . .] had compromised an entire system of general care to such an extent that even the middle class couldn't afford treatment. By then, the same forces of privatization [. . .] had compromised an entire system of general care to such an extent that even the middle class couldn't afford treatment.
By then, the same forces of privatization [. . .] had compromised an entire system of general care to such an extent that even the middle class couldn't afford treatment.
What was preventable in the 1980s would, in a couple of decades, become manifest; what once was treatable would become deadly. I'm not sure my immediate family's brushes with death when I was a kid – mom's hemorrhage in childbirth, Grandma's collapsed lung, Dad's chemical poisoning – would be survived today. Mom would have been less healthy going into labor, Grandma would have been sent home to soon for lack of insurance, Dad would have been given a cheaper and less effective treatment. The mortality rate for poor rural women, in particular, has risen sharply over my lifetime. (“The Body of a Poor Girl,” p. 73, Scribner (2018) [elisions added])
Dad liked it that way. Owning a small bit of the countryside brought him a deep satisfaction. The state had seized some of his dad's farmland through eminent domain in the 1960s to dig the reservoir and move water east in underground tunnels for the people of Wichita. Sometimes Dad would park his truck [. . .] along the lake dam [. . .] to look at what would have been his and then our small inheritance, now literally underwater. We couldn't use the water ourselves, it was for Wichitans to access by turning on a faucet. We thus had to dig a private well right next to to giant reservoir on what once was our land. It's an old story: pushing poor rural communities out of the way to tap natural resources for cities. (“A Stretch of Gravel with Wheat on Either Side,” p. 106, Scribner (2018)[elisions added])
With deepest reverence, thank you to my family, for surviving, with humor and dignity, the difficulties that allowed this book to exist. When I asked for their blessing to tell our shared past, they bravely answered yes. Their reasons for standing behind my work, as they sometimes told me: Because it might help someone else, and because it is true. (“Acknowledgements,” p. 290, Scribner (2018))
Ultime parole
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The best version of so many things has been conceived but remains unborn--like the girl you might have been and the country I trust your spirit is helping to create somewhere: America in high summer, tired from a season of fieldwork but clear-eyed and full of promise under the harvest moon.
Biography & Autobiography.
Sociology.
Nonfiction.
HTML:*Finalist for the National Book Award* *Finalist for the Kirkus Prize* *Instant New York Times Bestseller* *Named a Best Book of the Year by NPR, New York Post, BuzzFeed, Shelf Awareness, Bustle, and Publishers Weekly*
An essential read for our times: an eye-opening memoir of working-class poverty in America that will deepen our understanding of the ways in which class shapes our country and "a deeply humane memoir that crackles with clarifying insight".* Sarah Smarsh was born a fifth generation Kansas wheat farmer on her paternal side, and the product of generations of teen mothers on her maternal side. Through her experiences growing up on a farm thirty miles west of Wichita, we are given a unique and essential look into the lives of poor and working class Americans living in the heartland.
During Sarah's turbulent childhood in Kansas in the 1980s and 1990s, she enjoyed the freedom of a country childhood, but observed the painful challenges of the poverty around her; untreated medical conditions for lack of insurance or consistent care, unsafe job conditions, abusive relationships, and limited resources and information that would provide for the upward mobility that is the American Dream. By telling the story of her life and the lives of the people she loves with clarity and precision but without judgement, Smarsh challenges us to look more closely at the class divide in our country.
Beautifully written, in a distinctive voice, Heartland combines personal narrative with powerful analysis and cultural commentary, challenging the myths about people thought to be less because they earn less.
"Heartland is one of a growing number of important works??including Matthew Desmond's Evicted and Amy Goldstein's Janesville??that together merit their own section in nonfiction aisles across the country: America's postindustrial decline...Smarsh shows how the false promise of the 'American dream' was used to subjugate the poor. It's a powerful mantra" *(The New York Times Book Review)
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