Heartland
Book description
*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…
Why read it?
4 authors picked Heartland as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?
This book takes on class, gender, and addiction, plus a host of other contemporary issues facing rural America and the nation—and Smarsh still manages to craft a compelling, human memoir.
This book might be the antidote to all the easy, anodyne, partisan conclusions the talking heads offer about rural America. As someone who grew up in rural America but now lives in a small city on the West Coast, I felt challenged reading this memoir.
Smarsh is the best kind of rabble-rouser; she’s telling it straight no matter who is listening.
From Joe's list on books about rural America.
This is a book I think should be required reading as it delves into Sarah Smarsh’s upbringing in rural Kansas and her experiences breaking her family’s cycle of poverty. As a memoir, we get a deep look at Smarsh’s life, spanning multiple generations of financial, physical, and mental struggles.
I identified so much with this book and appreciated that Smarsh bares so much of herself in order to get readers to understand the challenges that rural communities are going through. She is truly a fierce female, and I want everyone to read this memoir!
From Kerri's list on fierce female protagonists.
This memoir deals with the present reality and future likely realities of being a poor person in rural, “fly-over” America.
Smarsh details her upbringing in Kansas while describing the people who influenced her. This is a well-written, educational book I — as someone who grew up in rural Kentucky — easily connected with and thoroughly enjoyed.
If you love Heartland...
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Tap Dancing on Everest, part coming-of-age memoir, part true-survival adventure story, is about a young medical student, the daughter of a Holocaust survivor raised in N.Y.C., who battles self-doubt to serve as the doctor—and only woman—on a remote Everest climb in Tibet.
The team attempts a new route up…
I love this book for its honesty, depth, intelligence—and heart—as well as for the beauty of the prose.
Sarah Smarsh details the story of several generations of her family and their struggles to overcome the difficulties presented by teenage motherhood. Determined not to continue this pattern, she creates a successful life for herself as a professor and journalist.
While her story is very specific to her family, it is also one that echoes the lives of millions of hard-working Americans who struggle to overcome the obstacles to achieving stability and dignity in their lives no matter how hard they work.…
From Janet's list on literary memoirs from the Midwest.
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