Summary of Sarah Smarsh's Heartland

Everest Media

Description

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book.
Sample Book Insights:
#1 The farm was 30 miles west of Wichita on the silty loam of southern Kansas. It had three nicknames: the breadbasket of the world, the air capital of the world, and tornado alley. The area was known for its government-subsidized grain production, airplane-manufacturing industry, and its tornadoes.
#2 Betty and Arnie met at a dance, and after a few dates, she moved into his farmhouse. She learned how to cook for him and his field workers, and she fell in love with him. He treated her better than she had ever been treated.
#3 After a few months, Arnie asked Betty to marry him. She thought she was done with all that, but she ended up marrying him outside the Church anyway, in September 1977, at a little chapel on a highway next to a trailer park.
#4 Arnie had a huge impact on my life, as he was the one who asked Betty to two-step. He was such a bright light for us that I thought of calling you after his middle name: August.

Sujets

• Love
• Love (disambiguation)

Informations

• Publié par: Everest Media LLC
• Date de parution: 28 mars 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781669368281
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Insights on Sarah Smarsh's Heartland
Contents Insights from Chapter 1 Insights from Chapter 2 Insights from Chapter 3 Insights from Chapter 4 Insights from Chapter 5 Insights from Chapter 6 Insights from Chapter 7
Insights from Chapter 1

#1

The farm was 30 miles west of Wichita on the silty loam of southern Kansas. It had three nicknames: the breadbasket of the world, the air capital of the world, and tornado alley. The area was known for its government-subsidized grain production, airplane-manufacturing industry, and its tornadoes.

#2

Betty and Arnie met at a dance, and after a few dates, she moved into his farmhouse. She learned how to cook for him and his field workers, and she fell in love with him. He treated her better than she had ever been treated.

#3

After a few months, Arnie asked Betty to marry him. She thought she was done with all that, but she ended up marrying him outside the Church anyway, in September 1977, at a little chapel on a highway next to a trailer park.

#4

Arnie had a huge impact on my life, as he was the one who asked Betty to two-step. He was such a bright light for us that I thought of calling you after his middle name: August.

#5

I liked the laugh that Arnie had, and I often followed him around the farm when I was a little girl. His name represents a corrective, or at least a defiance, on both counts. I didn’t know what august meant, but I knew how to pronounce it.

#6

I grew up on a farm in the Great Plains, which was spurned by more powerful corners of the country as a cultural wasteland. I didn’t know anyone who was truly middle class.

#7

Betty left Wichita with her baby daughter in 1963, and ended up in Chicago. She had no money, but she had a job and a cheap apartment. She was unimpressed with Chicago, but she made the best of it.

#8

Betty worked at a factory that made screws for furniture, and she was paid well. But she was also used to getting paid the federal minimum wage of $1. 15. She couldn’t afford to see a movie, but she visited the Chicago Natural History Museum.

#9

Nick’s parents were Catholic farm people, and they had six children. Nick was the youngest, and he turned out to be a worker among workers. His productivity and money saving impressed even his stingy parents.

#10

In the 1970s, the country was experiencing an energy crisis and a moral one. People were becoming more aware of how materialism wasn’t satisfying their needs, but they had yet to discover the true answers.

#11

Carter’s poll numbers went up, but the country didn’t change. That America couldn’t hear his message about worshiping the false idol of wealth is a public fact that would be felt privately by the poor for decades to come.

#12

I was in a poor girl’s lining like a penny in a purse, not worth much, but kept in production. My parents brought me home to a tiny red shack they had rented in the same little community where I’d been conceived.

#13

I was born in 1980, just a few months before Ronald Reagan’s inauguration and the start of the Great Recession. I grew up in Kansas, and my family and I were largely unaware of our own economic status. We were so unaware of our own station that we thought we were middle class.

#14

My father had to fold his foundation-laying business a couple years before I was born. We moved to a trailer in the country, and my mother began selling things to get money. When Dad had paid off the bit of land he bought for our house, he used it as collateral for a bank loan to buy building materials.

#15

I grew up on the farm with my parents and grandparents. Dad was a tender person, and he took care of me. He showed me how to pull a xylophone by a string and a hayrack by a truck with a manual transmission.

#16

I knew that I existed because I was an accident. I had materialized over one word that either wasn’t heard or wasn’t heeded: don’t. The price of my existence was made clear, and my actions either justified it or didn’t.

#17

I grew up with a scarcity of the heart, a constant state of longing for the mother right in front of me but out of reach. I wanted her affection, but more than anything, I wanted her to be happy.

#18