Summary of Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth

By Paul Adams

Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth by Sarah Smarsh: Conversation Starters

Sarah Smarsh asked herself “what would I tell my daughter?” It’s this question that kept her on track, pursuing an education and using the can-do attitude which she inherited from her family to rise out of the cycle of poverty. She writes about the women and men in her family in a tone filled with love and care as she talks about their survival concerns. White but poor women had to bear pregnancies without adequate health care. They held physical jobs that chain them to repetitive work. She tells how it is to go through the shame of being poor. Smarsh gets educated and gets a better life but many other farmers’ families remain poor and their poverty is associated with being bad. The economic inequality that is revealed in her story is an indictment of a country that “has failed its children.” The American Conservative review says it is a book with a “transformative vision” and is a message needed to “wake up a blind and uncaring America.”
Heartland is an instant New York Times bestseller. It is a Finalist for the National Book Award.

A Brief Look Inside:

EVERY GOOD BOOK CONTAINS A WORLD FAR DEEPER

than the surface of its pages. The characters and their world come alive,

and the characters and its world still live on.

Conversation Starters is peppered with questions designed to

bring us beneath the surface of the page

and invite us into the world that lives on.

These questions can be used to create hours of conversation:

Foster a deeper understanding of the book

Promote an atmosphere of discussion for groups

Assist in the study of the book, either individually or corporately

Explore unseen realms of the book as never seen before

Disclaimer: This book you are about to enjoy is an independent companion resource of the original book, enhancing your experience. If you have not yet purchased a copy of the original book, please do before purchasing these unofficial Conversation Starters.

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• Language: English
• Publisher: BH
• Release date: Dec 12, 2018

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Introducing Heartland

H

eartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth is a book written by Sarah Smarsh. The book tells the story of Smarsh who grows up in Kansas as a daughter to a family of working-class farmers in the 1980s and 90s. Smarsh relates her story by talking to an imaginary unborn child of hers, who by not being born, allows Smarsh to break the cycle which condemned her parents and grandparents to poverty. Smarsh believes that her family’s poverty is partly because the women marry at an early age. Her mother was a teenager when she got pregnant with her. All the other women in her family were likewise young mothers who did grueling farm work in order to