Little Heathens: Hard Times and High Spirits on an Iowa Farm During the Great Depression | 
 enlarge | Author: Mildred Armstrong Kalish
Publisher: Bantam
Category: Book
List Price: $22.00
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Avg. Customer Rating:  82 reviews
Sales Rank: 58171
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 1
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 304
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.6
Dimensions (in): 8.3 x 5.6 x 0.7
ISBN: 0553804952
Dewey Decimal Number: 977.761033092
EAN: 9780553804959
ASIN: 0553804952
Publication Date: May 29, 2007
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
I tell of a time, a place, and a way of life long gone. For many years I have had the urge to describe that treasure trove, lest it vanish forever. So, partly in response to the basic human instinct to share feelings and experiences, and partly for the sheer joy and excitement of it all, I report on my early life. It was quite a romp.
So begins Mildred Kalish’s story of growing up on her grandparents’ Iowa farm during the depths of the Great Depression. With her father banished from the household for mysterious transgressions, five-year-old Mildred and her family could easily have been overwhelmed by the challenge of simply trying to survive. This, however, is not a tale of suffering.
Kalish counts herself among the lucky of that era. She had caring grandparents who possessed—and valiantly tried to impose—all the pioneer virtues of their forebears, teachers who inspired and befriended her, and a barnyard full of animals ready to be tamed and loved. She and her siblings and their cousins from the farm across the way played as hard as they worked, running barefoot through the fields, as free and wild as they dared.
Filled with recipes and how-tos for everything from catching and skinning a rabbit to preparing homemade skin and hair beautifiers, apple cream pie, and the world’s best head cheese (start by scrubbing the head of the pig until it is pink and clean), Little Heathens portrays a world of hardship and hard work tempered by simple rewards. There was the unsurpassed flavor of tender new dandelion greens harvested as soon as the snow melted; the taste of crystal clear marble-sized balls of honey robbed from a bumblebee nest; the sweet smell from the body of a lamb sleeping on sun-warmed grass; and the magical quality of oat shocking under the light of a full harvest moon.
Little Heathens offers a loving but realistic portrait of a “hearty-handshake Methodist” family that gave its members a remarkable legacy of kinship, kindness, and remembered pleasures. Recounted in a luminous narrative filled with tenderness and humor, Kalish’s memoir of her childhood shows how the right stuff can make even the bleakest of times seem like “quite a romp.”
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| Customer Reviews: Read 77 more reviews...
 In the minority here August 9, 2008
4 out of 6 found this review helpful
I know everyone loved this book. The New York Times Book Review named it one of the 10 best books of 2007. I just don't get it. There are chapters on frugality and outhouse pranks and nut gathering. Cold winters and back-breaking chores abound, but none of it held my interest. Despite the slimness of the volume, I struggled to finish. This memoir reads like an disjointed collection of encyclopedia entries pertaining to country life rather than a living, breathing experience.
 LOVE this book! August 5, 2008
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
This book was so comforting to read. I'd fix a cupof tea, grab the book and go hide in a quiet room to read. With all the hardships she faced on the farm, I still am envious. What a wonderful way to remember your childhood. I'd recommend this to anyone!
Enjoyed every word. August 4, 2008
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
To me this well written book was so enjoyable from beginning to the end; it is the way it was and I almost found myself envying this family. It took me back to basics and a time I remembered so well and identified with their way of life.
 Some good moments marred by poor writing and suffocating nostalgia July 31, 2008
0 out of 3 found this review helpful
This book was a disappointment. There were some good moments but overall the whole thing felt very thin-- strangely lacking in analysis and perspective. Nearly every chapter ends with a rhetorical question whose only purpose is to demonstrate how wonderful things were "back then." For example the chapter about gardening ends this way "Do you need to be told, that with the addition of a marrow bone, Mama produced a magnificent soup. ..? Need I add that I adopted this final gathering routine right down to making a great soup in my own gardening days?" Unfortunately, by this point in the book, Kalish certainly doesn't need to tell us these things. This rhetorical strategy was exceedingly annoying throughout.
Yes, Kalish succeeds in describing how hard everyone worked back then, and that there were advantages to living so close to the natural world (her penultimate chapter on the family pets is one of the best). But too much of the book takes on the tone of a cranky old relative spinning out only half-believable stories in a scolding tone. She often asks the reader "Can you imagine children of today doing such a task?" Of course the only possible answer Kalish can imagine is No.
There are no other real characters in this book other than Kalish herself. Early on she writes about a charming maiden aunt named Belle, but other than Belle nobody else comes to life. Her brothers and sisters, even her mother are strangely flat--we are given no sense of them at all. Skip this one, and go rent a few episodes of the Waltons instead. You'll get more character development, better writing, and fewer lectures.
 the power of time and place July 28, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
My wife read all nine volumes of the Little House series by Laura Ingalls Wilder (b. 1867) to our children, but if that's a stretch for your busy schedule, then Mildred Kalish's (b. 1922) best seller is a fine substitute. Kalish does for the Depression years what Wilder did for the American frontier, which is to give a nostalgic but realistic first person account of a place and time that is now lost to most people. Except for her epilogue, Kalish recounts her early childhood years on her grandparents' 240-acre farm in rural Iowa. As you would expect, her people epitomized the thrift, self-reliance, industry and independence of a family for whom "land was plentiful but money was almost non-existent." Individual chapters describe farm life, daily chores, a typical Thanksgiving that took two weeks to prepare, church life, wash day, the farm windmill, the outhouse, food (complete with many recipes), and more. As a young girl Kalish could skin a rabbit, butcher a live chicken, and fry a snapping turtle. But there were limits. She was not allowed to see her uncle wield a sledge hammer to slay a hog or use the butcher knife to severe its head.
Kalish acknowledges that not all people loved those years like she does even today. Her sister Avis refuses to talk about it at all. Nor does she gloss over negative aspects of her upbringing. She lived with her mother's parents because when she was about five her father was banished forever from the family and community for some unspoken misdeed, and his name was, quite literally, never mentioned again in her presence. She doesn't even know when he died. Her people were stern and emotionally reserved. They could be proud and moralistic. Any and all talk about sex education was strictly forbidden. Still, Kalish describes her upbringing as a "gift" for which she remains grateful, and in her telling it's easy to see why. A dozen or so original photos enhance the reading. The New York Times named this memoir one of the "Ten Best Books of 2007."
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