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AMERICAN HARVEST

GOD, COUNTRY, AND FARMING IN THE HEARTLAND

A revealing, richly textured portrait of the lives of those who put food on our tables.

Literate travels in the forgotten American hinterlands.

Mockett (Where the Dead Pause, and the Japanese Say Goodbye, 2015, etc.) is a child of “the coasts: seventeen years in California, four years of college in New York City, more years of ping-ponging between the East and West Coasts,” the kind of person likely to think of the territory in between as flyover country. Yet, with a Japanese mother and High Plains father, she knows that ground well, having spent summers on a family farm that spilled over from Nebraska into Colorado. The author returned to explore the work of itinerant contract or “custom” harvesters whose “routes across state lines were established by men, who handed down their itineraries to their sons, and harvesting became a family business.” Traveling with one such family across the center of the country, Mockett analyzes the divides between rural and urban, religious and apathetic or atheistic, conservative and liberal. Even in her own family, she writes, those differences were profound, but what is a bicoastal, educated person to make of someone who believes “that man was around at the time of the dinosaur”? Refreshingly, the author finds that conversation is just the thing; with it, some stereotypes shade away or at least become more complicated, as with that young fundamentalist who also maintained that if someone is pro-life, “they would help children, not just abandon them.” On the other hand, some farmers and harvesters spend their off time at the Omniplex, a sprawling science museum in Oklahoma City, and some hold education and the “uncharted world” in our minds in esteem while others hold the Bible to be the sole truth. What some city sophisticates dismiss as monoculture, many country people praise as progress. Throughout, Mockett’s portrait is nuanced, revealing those overlooked people in counties likely to have voted for the sitting president to be worth paying attention to.

A revealing, richly textured portrait of the lives of those who put food on our tables.

Pub Date: April 7, 2020

ISBN: 978-1-64445-017-8

Page Count: 416

Publisher: Graywolf

Review Posted Online: Jan. 6, 2020

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020

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NIGHT

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...

Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children. 

He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006

ISBN: 0374500010

Page Count: 120

Publisher: Hill & Wang

Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006

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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

Well-told and admonitory.

Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.

Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.

Well-told and admonitory.

Pub Date: June 1, 2006

ISBN: 0-06-074486-3

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006

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