Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth Audiobook (Free)

*Finalist for the National Book Prize*

*Finalist for the Kirkus Reward*

*Instant NY Times Bestseller*

*Named a Best Reserve of the Year by NPR, New York Post, BuzzFeed, Shelf Understanding, Bustle, and Publishers Weekly*

An important read for our instances: an eye-opening memoir of working-class poverty in America that may deepen our understanding of the ways in which class shapes our country and “a deeply humane memoir that crackles with clarifying insight”.*

Sarah Smarsh was born a fifth about Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Getting Broke in the Richest Country on Earth generation Kansas wheat farmer on her paternal side, and the merchandise of decades of teen moms on her maternal part. Through her encounters growing up on a farm thirty miles west of Wichita, we receive a unique and essential look into the lives of poor and working class Americans surviving in the heartland.

During Sarah’s turbulent child years in Kansas in the 1980s and 1990s, she loved the freedom of a country youth, but noticed the painful difficulties from the poverty around her; untreated medical ailments for insufficient insurance or constant care, unsafe job conditions, abusive relationships, and limited resources and information that would give the upward flexibility this is the American Dream. By telling the story of her existence as well as the lives of the people she enjoys with clarity and precision but without judgement, Smarsh issues us to look more closely in the class divide inside our country.

Beautifully written, in a distinctive tone of voice, Heartland combines personal narrative with effective analysis and cultural commentary, demanding the common myths about people thought to be much less because they gain less.

“Heartland is one of a growing number of important functions—including Matthew Desmond’s Evicted and Amy Goldstein’s Janesville—that jointly merit their very own section in non-fiction aisles across the country: America’s postindustrial drop…Smarsh shows the way the false promise of the ‘American dream’ was utilized to subjugate the indegent. It’s a robust mantra” *(The New York Times Book Review).