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Zusatztext “You might think that a book about growing up on a poor Kansas farm would qualify as ‘sociology!’ and Heartland certainly does.… But this book is so much more than even the best sociology. It is poetry—of the wind and snow! the two-lane roads running through the wheat! the summer nights when work-drained families drink and dance under the prairie sky.” —Barbara Ehrenreich! author of Nickel and Dimed “Sarah Smarsh—tough-minded and rough-hewn—draws us into the real lives of her family! barely making it out there on the American plains. There’s not a false note. Smarsh! as a writer! is Authentic with a capital A .… This is just what the world needs to hear.” —George Hodgman! author of Bettyville “Sarah Smarsh is one of America’s foremost writers on class. Heartland is about an impossible dream for anyone born into poverty—a leap up in class! doubly hard for a woman. Smarsh’s journey from a little girl into adulthood in Kansas speaks to tens of thousands of girls now growing up poor in what so many dismiss as ‘flyover country.’ Heartland offers a fresh and riveting perspective on the middle of the nation all too often told through the prism of men.” —Dale Maharidge! author of Pulitzer Prize-winning And Their Children After Them Informationen zum Autor Sarah Smarsh is a journalist who has reported for The New York Times , Harper’s Magazine , The Guardian , and many other publications. Her first book, Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth , was a finalist for the National Book Award. Her second book, She Come By It Natural: Dolly Parton and the Women Who Lived Her Songs , was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Smarsh is a frequent political commentator and speaker on socioeconomic class. She lives in Kansas. Klappentext A perfect companion to Evicted and Nickel and Dimed , this work reveals one woman's experience of working-class poverty with a startlingly observed, eye-opening, and topical personal story.Heartland 1 A PENNY IN A PURSE The farm was thirty miles west of Wichita on the silty loam of southern Kansas that never asked for more than prairie grass. The area had three nicknames: “the breadbasket of the world” for its government-subsidized grain production, “the air capital of the world” for its airplane-manufacturing industry, and “tornado alley” for its natural offerings. Warm, moist air from the Gulf to the south clashes with dry, cool air from the Rocky Mountains to the west. In the springtime, the thunderstorms are so big you can smell them before you see or hear them. Arnie, a man I would later call my grandpa, bought the farm-house during the 1950s to raise a young family. He spent days sowing, tending, and harvesting wheat. He eventually owned about 160 acres, which is a quarter of a square mile, and farmed another quarter he didn’t own. That might sound big-time in places where crops like grapes are prized in small bunches. But for a wheat farmer in the twentieth century, when the price per bushel had been pushed down by the market even as yields had been pushed up by technology, it was just enough to earn a small living. When a wheat crop was lost to storm damage or volunteer rye, sometimes milo went in. Arnie raised alfalfa, too, to bale for his fifty head of cattle. He also kept pigs, chickens, the odd goat or horse. He had one hired hand, and his sons and daughters pitched in at harvest. For extra money during the winter, when the fields were frozen, he butchered for a meat locker down the highway toward Wichita and sold aluminum cans he co...
