Nostalgia and yearning for a simple, self-sufficient life

books:

	• Little Heathens: Hard Times and High Spirits on an Iowa Farm During the Great Depression Mildred Armstrong Kalish Bantam, 2008 - 304 pages average customer review:based on 93 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

One of the 10 Best of 2007

Just voted one of the 10 Best Books of 2007 by the New York Times and the Christian Science Monitor...

A generation younger

Besides being an enjoyable read, this is a very important ethnographic work documenting a piece of an era in U.S. history that left its mark not only on those who lived it, but on the generations that followed. I grew up on a farm in Southwestern Wisconsin in the 40s and 50s, a skip, hop and jump from the location of the communities described in this book. My parents experiences as children of the Depression carried over to the upbringing of the next (my) genration, as well. While reading, my mental reference was the old green shingled farm house where my grandparents lived just across the border in northern Illinois. It was equally as cold in winter as the ones described in this book. There was a big old iron cook stove in the kitchen; my Grandma made the best bread I've ever tasted and had the most diverse garden I've ever known. So many things written about in this book brought back wonderful and painful memories of growing up in the upper Midwest. I am going to keep this book on my cookbook shelves so, when the mood strikes, I might try to make homemade marshmallows! Thank you Mildred Armstrong Kalish, not only for the recipes, but for an important ethnographic and historical, yet thoroughly entertaining work.

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A Wonderful Memoir

Little Heathens is a wonderful memoir, heartwarming, but without a hint of treacle. Mildred Kalish grew up during tough times on an Iowa farm and lived a life many would complain about, but there is no bitterness in her story, simply an appreciation of her life and a love of her family. I read a lot of books and I have to say this one is like no other--an inspiring, yet wholly enjoyable story. I recommended this one to two people during the space of half an hour, one is 75, the other is 11, and both simply loved it. I would recommend it to all in between as well. Little Heathens is an engaging, fascinating story. Enjoy.

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rollicking tale of high times during hard days

Mildred Armstrong Kalish has provided readers with a rare treat in this rollicking memoir of growing up in rural Iowa during the Depression years.

Meticulously written, filled with the sights, sounds, and smells of a vanished way of life, this book will hold you captive from the first page to the last. Armstrong's book is filled with hardy characters, skillful and canny, equal to the sometimes harrowing situations they faced.

I wouldn't describe this as a "feel-good" memoir, as Kalish writes as honestly and precisely about the difficulties and the heartbreaks, as she does about the many delights. This is a window into the heartland of many decades past, as well as a window into human hearts of any age. It deserves the highest rating.

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Nostalgia and yearning for a simple, self-sufficient life

As can be quickly discerned from the book's subtitle and from many of the Amazon reviews, LITTLE HEATHENS is about life on a farm in Iowa during the 1930s. The principal reason I bought and read the book was because my late father also lived on a farm in Iowa in the 1930s, although he was a few years older than the author, Mildred Armstrong Kalish. Because my father and I never talked much about his youth, I had a personal interest in Kalish's book -- namely, to get a better sense of the circumstances in which my father grew up. And from that perspective, this book certainly delivers; it is chock-full of information about life in rural America in the 1930s -- at least those portions of rural America that were almost exclusively white and where most of the farmers were able to avoid bankruptcy and keep their farms going.

But truth be told, LITTLE HEATHENS is not a great book. In saying that I don't believe I demean the book. For one thing, I don't believe the author intended it to be "great". Kalish comes across as a smart, industrious, and very decent woman, and her book is a detailed, readable, and relatively well-written (although at times somewhat cliched and over-written) account of what was a rather commonplace farm-based childhood in the 1930s. But that's not the stuff of greatness.

What is interesting to me is all the acclaim the book has received, as evidenced by preceding Amazon reviews and the fact that the New York Times saw fit to name it one of its notable non-fiction books of 2007. I can't help but think that for many readers the book strikes a chord of nostalgia and evokes a yearning (perhaps unconscious) for a simple and self-sufficient life. But the Iowa farmlife of Kalish's childhood entailed hard work and cooperation, and I doubt that many contemporary American families, except perhaps the few remaining farming/ranching families, are willing or able to work as hard as the families -- both adults and children -- did then. It also required a faith in the moral rectitude of one's lifestyle, and that that lifestyle secured one a favored place in God's universe, that is much less prevalent today than it was 75 years ago. Further, it was not very accommodating of those who did not share the same race, northern European heritage, or Protestant religion, or those who did not conform to a certain standard of behavior (witness the author's father who was permanently expelled from the family and cut off from his wife and children by the author's grandfather for reasons the author never learned). The brute fact of the matter is that the independent and insular world that Kalish describes was swept away by fascism, militarism, and World War II, and the following tides of history and technology and the sheer numbers of humans populating the planet. And, as was the title of another product of the Thirties, "You Can't Go Home Again."

I sense that Kalish is well aware of that point. But I also sense that many of her readers are not.

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reviews: 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, page 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19

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