American Harvest
God, Country, and Farming in the Heartland
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
An epic story of the American wheat harvest, the politics of food, and the culture of the Great Plains
For over one hundred years, the Mockett family has owned a seven-thousand-acre wheat farm in the panhandle of Nebraska, where Marie Mutsuki Mockett’s father was raised. Mockett, who grew up in bohemian Carmel, California, with her father and her Japanese mother, knew little about farming when she inherited this land. Her father had all but forsworn it.
In American Harvest, Mockett accompanies a group of evangelical Christian wheat harvesters through the heartland at the invitation of Eric Wolgemuth, the conservative farmer who has cut her family’s fields for decades. As Mockett follows Wolgemuth’s crew on the trail of ripening wheat from Texas to Idaho, they contemplate what Wolgemuth refers to as “the divide,” inadvertently peeling back layers of the American story to expose its contradictions and unhealed wounds. She joins the crew in the fields, attends church, and struggles to adapt to the rhythms of rural life, all the while continually reminded of her own status as a person who signals “not white,” but who people she encounters can’t quite categorize.
American Harvest is an extraordinary evocation of the land and a thoughtful exploration of ingrained beliefs, from evangelical skepticism of evolution to cosmopolitan assumptions about food production and farming. With exquisite lyricism and humanity, this astonishing book attempts to reconcile competing versions of our national story.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
San Francisco author Mockett (Picking Bones from Ash) takes a road trip in the summer of 2017 to "flyover states" with a crew of wheat harvesters in this well-written but dense take on farming, race, and religion. Mockett embarked on the trip which included stops in Idaho, Oklahoma, and Texas at the invitation of a farmer named Eric, the head of a harvesting crew who for decades has cut the wheat on the Mockett family farm in Nebraska. He wanted Mockett, who was born and raised in California and spent her childhood summers on the farm, to see more of her country and meet its rural residents. Mockett, who is half Japanese, discusses being surrounded by whiteness on her trip and offers history lessons on Native American displacement and the impact of the transcontinental railroad, among other topics as she travels and meets farm workers, most of whom are churchgoing Christians who often engage in long conversations about the Bible. As for farming itself, Mockett explains that every year workers like Eric take a "harvesting route" across the middle of America with tractors and combines, and discusses the realities of crop production and of "organic" farming ("It is marketing," Eric says. "Do not fall for it"). Filled with rich descriptions, this illuminating memoir wonderfully captures farming life in Middle America.
