American Harvest

God, Country, and Farming in the Heartland

De: Marie Mutsuki Mockett

Narrado por: Marie Mutsuki Mockett

For over 100 years, the Mockett family has owned a 7,000-acre wheat farm in Nebraska, where Marie Mutsuki Mockett’s father was raised. Mockett, who grew up in Carmel, California, with her father and her Japanese mother, knew little about farming when she inherited this land. Her father had all but foresworn it.

At the invitation of Eric Wolgemuth, the conservative farmer who has cut her family’s fields for decades, Mockett accompanies a group of evangelical wheat harvesters through the heartland as they follow the trail of ripening wheat from Texas to Idaho. Together they contemplate what Eric refers to as “the divide”, 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 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 powerful book attempts to reconcile competing versions of our national story.

©2020 Marie Mutsuki Mockett (P)2020 Recorded Books

If only she could read as well as she writes:-(

So much to digest about this timely and interesting book, but being a 20+ year Audible reader I wish Ms Mockett had allowed a more skilled reader to bring her descriptive words to life. I was pained listening to her fracture a sentence and use the wrong inflection for her meaty narrative. As one reviewer noted this is not the book to “explain” farming, but a very interesting explanation/interpretation of the residents of the heartland.

Harvesting Wheat in America

Take a trip to the plains of the USA with this book; it puts you there from Texas to Idaho with the dedicated people who harvest, and the farmers who grow the wheat. The author, who followed one harvest from May to October, narrates, and you can feel emotions during several passages. Religion's role in American life is a subtext and there is insightful reporting of how American Indians have been and are treated in the context of life on the plains. Contrasts are here between the beauty of the wheat fields and the often lack of compassion of caucasian farming families towards Indian lives. Urban and rural contrasts are also described.

Beautiful, soulful journey into the heartland

I’ve been reading many memoirs of people and places in the US of which I’m not so familiar: Educated, Hillbilly Elegy, Strangers in their Own Land to name a few. This book is nothing like those in that Mockett’s journey is much more personal as well as soulful. As she travels with the harvesters across the country she not only observes them, but her own struggles with her own assumptions, contradictions and biases that, in their commonality with urban people who have no understanding of that world, have lead to the great divide. It enabled me to recognize many of the same biases within myself and I come away with a desire to get to know the people she introduces us to in her book more. I only wish the half of the crew that never trusted her enough to really talk with her (Bethany, Amos etc) would at some point open up with their perspective. On the audio version, while I loved that it was read by the author, I thought the reading a little stilted and wished it had a more conversational tone.

To think is a privilege, a right and a blessing of man. It's hard not to think while listening to this book.

I first heard about the author in the podcast "The World and Everything in It" where she introduced the book, its content and characters, and most importantly, her experiences. The answers to the podcast host's questions actually turned out to be an organic and intriguing introduction to the book itself and made it possible to understand the motives of the author. The book is inherently not quite ordinary in that its characters are real and continue to live their lives, I involuntarily reflect on how their lives go on. A special event for me was the discovery of another, little known, but well described side of American society. I now look at the bread thinking about what part of the country it is from and who collected the grain for it, who they are and what they are doing now. We should think more often about even the simplest things, their origin and the people who created them.

Best read ever

I loved the author’s voice, pacing, enunciation and emotions. I would have loved reading the book too, as the story is an important one, and the writing is sublime. But being taken in this journey through her own pacing was for me the best part. I feel as though I understand the heartland much better, and the factions between liberals and conservatives has been mended with true empathy. I believe this book serves a great purpose of healing the divide between the ends of America and its middle.