Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth Audible Audio Edition: Sarah Smarsh, Sarah Smarsh, Simon Schuster Audio: Books by Sarah Smarsh


Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth Audible Audio Edition: Sarah Smarsh, Sarah Smarsh, Simon Schuster Audio: Books
Title : Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth Audible Audio Edition: Sarah Smarsh, Sarah Smarsh, Simon Schuster Audio: Books
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Finalist for the National Book Award and the Kirkus Prize Instant New York Times best seller Named a Best Book of 2018 by NPR, The New York Post, Buzzfeed (nonfiction), Shelf Awareness (nonfiction), Bustle, and Publishers Weekly (nonfiction). An essential audiobook 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.  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 30 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 closely at the class divide in our country.  A beautifully written memoir that combines personal narrative with powerful analysis and cultural commentary, Heartland examines the myths about people thought to be less because they earn less.  “A deeply humane memoir that crackles with clarifying insight, 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 declineSmarsh 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)

Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth Audible Audio Edition: Sarah Smarsh, Sarah Smarsh, Simon Schuster Audio: Books Reviews

  • Bryan Carey

    Personal memoirs can focus in so many areas of life and they can invoke many emotions. Some are funny. Others are tragic or sad, while still others try their best to tell a story without getting too emotional overall. A book that is sad at times, shocking at others, yet

  • Charles Salmans

    This was a book that in sections, or because of a turn of phrase, I liked very much, interspersed with sections that I found disjointed or undeveloped. Overall, author Sarah Smarsh challenged my stereotypes about the rural “poor” of Kansas but she also left me short of

  • Kim Fairchild

    I grew up in the same town and know this family and others like them. I have to say I am a bit disappointed that the author stereotypes Kansas farm families and the small towns in which they live. The "being broke" part of her title was many times the result of choices

  • carilynp

    Put Sarah Smarsh’s HEARTLAND: A MEMOIR OF WORKING HARD AND BEING BROKE IN THE RICHEST COUNTRY ON EARTH on your list of must read books. It’s the kind of book that is so painstakingly vulnerable and hard to imagine yet, you can imagine it through the author’s eyes because

  • JoeInTampa

    This is an excellent memoir that could benefit those people who have never experienced the life of farmers or small towns that rely on the farmers in the community for their livelihood. Too many coastal dwellers and way, way too many politicians and talking heads on cable

  • Joan Colby

    . Smarsh’s account of rural life puts Hillbilly Elegy to shame. Her voice is authentic as are her accounts of growing up on an impoverished family farm in southeast Kansas. Generations of her family have lived in this area starting with the first homesteaders. Smarsh

  • TB Reader

    Raw gut wrenching truth. Convicting and challenging. Tough to read but certainly worth it. If I’m the Christ follower I claim to be then this book ought to wake me up. I loved her story and wish everyone I know would read it. Certainly gave me new perspective for the

  • Danton M.

    I graduated from a small Kansas high school in 1980, the year Sarah Smarsh was born, having been born myself in 1962, the same year as her mother Jeannie. The son of a cook turned carpenter and a mother with arthritis that kept her from working outside the home, I can