THREE IMMENSELY IMPORTANT AND TRULY CAPTIVATING READS ABOUT LIFE IN  SMALL TOWN and/or RURAL AMERICA (plus five more briefly mentioned)

With my wife’s cancer and my birthday fast approaching and our store’s happy 43rd anniversary a week ago, I’ve been thinking about my life, my past, growing up, old high school pals, college friends. I miss my deceased parents and only brother (and several college buds who died too soon.) Beth would say the same. So these three books each touched me personally.

Growing up in the rural outskirts of a medium sized town in a rural county in the 1960s was, in some ways, idyllic. I had a lovely childhood, playing in cornfields and learning to hunt. It’s funny, in the mid-60s, the classmates I considered to be “rich kids” were, I now realize, merely middle class. We were, too, almost.

Paper Girl: A Memoir of Home and Family in a Fractured America Beth Macy (Penguin Press) $32.00 // OUR 20% OFF SALE PRICE = $25.60

Beth Macy’s Paper Girl is one of the most important books of the year, and certainly one I’ve pondered as much as any, lately. The stories she tells of returning to her small high school in rural Western Ohio — Urbana, near the town of Springfield that Trump’s people lied about, saying the Haitians were eating dogs — made me wonder about so much. (One of her class reunions went sideways as political polarization seeped into the reunion Facebook page and they had to cancel the whole thing.) My old high school is bigger and better than it was, I think, but for many of us, her story will resonant. She returns to a decimated Rust Belt economy, the social fabric tearing, the kids hurting, the school barely holding on. She got to college on a Pell Grant but, of course, Reagan and his Republicans slashed that years ago, and now Trump’s team is cutting the social safety net even more, so her story is tragic and urgent. As a rough-neck Midwesterner might say, it’s a helluva book. I’ll be listing Paper Girl as one of the best books of 2025 and wanted to give you a heads up.

I’m sort of choked up, thinking about this, my friends, but I want many readers to get this journalistic report-slash-memoir by a reporter I admire as much as any nonfiction journalist out there. I couldn’t put it down as she documents small town chaos, broken families, rural poverty, school truancy and social services hampered by right wing politics that seem to disdain anybody helping others. You may know her stunning Dopesick (the TV show was excellent, but the book had nuances as only a good book can) and the sequel — I called it a must-read and declared it one of the best books of the year two years ago — called Raising Lazarus: Hope, Justice, and the Future of America’s Overdose Crisis. Of course almost every Labor Day I highlight an old review I did of her specular Factory Man about a brave furniture factory owner in North Carolina who took on off-shore rip-offs, fighting global economy thugs to keep his workers employed. What a story of the little guy, of the complexity of institutional dysfunction, based on what we Christians would (or should) call idolatry. The principalities and powers were causing lay-offs and shut-downs and her story explored earnest resistance to the ways of the world. It, too, is one of my favorite books.

And so, when Paper Girl was touted as Macy’s most personal book yet, showing off her reporting chops and investigative journalism alongside her own memoir, I was excited. We stocked it here and I read it immediately. It was a great glimpse into a brave woman who endured the hardships of an alcoholic father and poverty stricken mother and became the first in her extended family to go to college. (Again, through the social investment of the Pell Grants which helped smart, poor kids go off to college.)

This is one of the compelling take-aways of the book, her Pell Grant example being nearly axiomatic: it helps us understand the need for institutional reforms, structural adjustments, policy proposals that are useful for the rural poor and to help alleviate complicated, multi-faceted problems facing many American regions that were hurt by the free trade stuff of Reagan and Clinton. Don’t get her talking about NAFTA and the other Neo-liberal reforms of the end of the last century. It was, as we see so clearly now in the current regime, an era that caused the rich to get richer, boldly so, and the poor to get further entrenched in various sorts of crummy hardships.

Paper Girl imagines what hardships a contemporary Beth Macy might be facing if she were growing up in Urbana, Ohio, in that same school, now, instead of in the 1980s. She finds some other youth who are facing domestic violence or parental alcoholism and the like and imagines that these kids are sort of like what her life was like. Except. Except there are more dangers and fewer supports, less help and greater odds. One boy — a beloved drum major in the dwindling high school band — sleeps in his car, a car that breaks down as he travels to his first week of community college. There is a youth center in town doing exceptional work but the founder of the remarkable nonprofit is gay and (despite being a former high school football star) is despised by many, and right-wing MAGA guys got a grant the center had won cancelled, significantly kneecapping the only major service of its kind in the town. Beth Macey travels with the teens, hangs out at the youth center and their after school programs and embeds herself with everyone from the beloved band director to a brave truancy specialist who faces down drug-addled parents, getting their kids to school. She tells the story of the hurting, small-town poor and a way that is impeccably documented, both experientially and citing the research of sociologists and researchers. Her passions for the poor and dispossessed is clear in her other vibrant books and it is tenderly on exhibit here. I admire her, her book, and want to press it into the hands of anyone who cares about a good chunk of our American citizenry.

Call it flyover country or the rust belt or whatever, but the region Macy describes and the stories she documents is both heartbreaking and infuriating. And the political polarization and the increasing dysfunction and poverty is happening near you, too.

I mentioned that there is more personal memoir / storytelling here than in her other  very engaging projects. This makes this book important (and page-turning) almost for another reason: it is a story — or at least a subplot in the engrossing narrative — of her own siblings and extended family that stayed in Ohio even after she moved away and won awards for journalism and public advocacy. She writes about her aging mom and other typical family stuff. And, yes, some of her loved ones are Trumpians, and, worse, some are QAnon conspiracy theorists. (As are some of her beloved high-school pals; they go out for coffee or drinks and promise not to talk politics, but one of them can’t not bring up the pedophile rings run by the Democrats and other bizarre accusations promoted by the weirdo-dark web.) Some family members are hurt by her liberal politics and others try to convert her to evangelical faith. Her now-regular visits back to Ohio and her trying to rebuild relations with extended family (including a family deeply distressed by accusations of sexual abuse, a niece that was believed only by Beth — the family Pentecostal pastor told them not to believe such accusations against a man he thought was Godly.)

This is crazy-making and anguishing but Macy keeps the narrative going, bringing in new chapters of the lives of the youth she’s tracking, the drama at the school and the youth center, the politics of the local town and county. It’s a snapshot of America, my friends, and an unforgettable one. It is no wonder the Pulitzer Prize winning author Geraldine Brooks calls it “heartfelt, intimate, and enraging”

The important journalist Jeff Sharlet (of the excellent, powerful, The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War) calls Macy “one of our greatest chroniclers of the America that’s fallen victim to the crises of capitalism” and suggests this book is “memoir, biography, elegy and advocacy.” Sarah Smarsh (famous for Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth and Bone of the Bone: Essays on America by a Daughter of the Working Class) says it is “essential.” She notes that the crisis Macy is exploring in Paper Girl “requires not just digging for facts but digging even deeper into our very souls.”

I Hate It Here, Please Vote for Me: Essays on Rural Political Decay Matthew Ferrence (West Virginia University press) $21.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $17.59

I would like to ease into this review telling you a dozen things I liked about it, the good writing, the feisty politics, the idealism, the rage. I could quote beautifully-crafted paragraphs that left me wondering “how does one learn to write like that?” and, yes, “wow.” I’m a fan of this incredible book and I commend it, at least to some of our readers.

I loved this book so much and it made me think about so much that I want to rave about it, but yet, there are some issues that a few readers will find distracting. It is very well crafted but a few times it is so poetically written, it is abstract to a point of being head-scratchingly obtuse (indeed, there is a whole chapter about poetics as politics and politics in need of poets. I think he is speaking mostly metaphorically, but still.) He’s a college lit prof who ran for office as a far-left Dem in a very red region, so quixotic that even the state party ignored his campaign — why invest in a sure loss? — and his anger about this drives much of the book. I don’t blame him, but geesh. So it’s both deeply written with poetics and metaphor that might lose some of us on occasion and it is angry. There’s that.

But he’s right. There’s a terrible scene of a Democratic breakfast in his Northwestern Pennsylvania town of Meadville when the shorts-wearing, rough-looking guy, urban hero and cool Lieutenant Governor of our fair Keystone State, (now Senato) John Fetterman appears and does not even mention Ferrence’s quixotic campaign, offering no local support other than the urgent call to vote for Biden. Ferrence is deep in the struggle and gets no help whatsoever from his party, not even a shout out when he is standing right there. Which not only makes him bitter, but is a symbol of what much of this powerful book is most about, a theme that Wendell Berry often describes: the main conflict in our culture is less ideological, as such, but is between rural and urban. And this dude is rural, having grown up on a farm in Indiana, Pennsylvania.

I know his exact home(somewhat blighted from careless coal mining) area outside of the state university that I attended — and where he now lives in what might be considered a rust belt town, in Crawford County in Northwest PA. Meadville was a robust industrial town and was once a heart of industry (they made, among other things, zippers!) Of course many of the robber baron types extracted wealth while paying poor wages and lived well elsewhere. Much of I Hate It Here, Please Vote for Me is about how both rural and rust-belt, postindustrial towns (not to mention inner cities) have much in common. They are passed over, mocked, despised and the people, for reasons sociologists are still trying to parse, often vote for candidates that do not have their back. This prophetic rant is the latest, and in some ways, the most tender and compelling, treatise to be read alongside Paper Girl by Beth Macy and, also, her Factory Man, or maybe Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right by Arlie Russell Hochschild (not to mention her amazing 2024 book Stolen Pride: Loss, Shame, and the Rise of the Right.) But his is beautiful and personal.

Here are two other striking portions of I Hate It Here… Besides the beautiful story of the nearly redemptive family farm in Indiana, PA (with strip mines and polluted creeks and fracking pipes all around) Ferrence and his new wife moved to the glorious desert ecology near the border with Mexico and his reflections about the topography there are glorious. But his passion for the dignify and freedom of refugees and immigrants is palpable and radical. His ruminations about the militias who knowingly trash the water stations set up in the desert for needy sojourners is righteously angry. The chapter about their season in the Southwest — and his longing for home in Pennsylvania — is worth the price of the book.

And then they move to Paris. His wife was pursuing a PhD in French and his vulnerable sharing of how out of place he felt, how foreign, was unlike any travel memoir I’ve read. I highly commend it, how he connects the poor seeking refuge in the American southwest and his own nostalgia for his family farm, and his hopes for a restoration of a sense of place when they return home. Themes of exile and homecoming are increasingly voiced and his yearning in that chapter is, without him saying it, is nearly spiritual.

But then there is the campaign. His loss. His bitterness. His failure. And his content rumination, from this angle and then that, about why rural folks, small town people, and rust belt burned over districts are plighted, caught, stuck, voting, regularly, for those who simply do not care for them or their places. He pulls no punches in talking about it; one chapter is specifically about violence and it is worth a couple of reads.

I mentioned that he makes much of metaphor; there is a chapter called “Crown Vetch” which is about an exploitative, colonizing, invasive species of nasty ground cover. You can imagine what he does with that. Another glorious chapter is “Succession” which, in natural history studies, is about the evolution of forests. He runs with that beautifully, too.

I do not know why he calls the book I Hate It Here as he clearly does not. He waxes beautifully about the natural grasses and flowers they’ve planted in their downtown Meadville home. He writes like Aldo Leopald and Wendell Berry, affirming the long-haul in the same place.

From lovely writing about the county fair (and great sections about showing animals) and the anguish of polarization between Red and Blue America and the details of running against a do-nothing, blustering right wing incumbent (who he ungraciously calls every name in the book) I Hate It Here, Please Vote for me: Essays on Rural Political Decay is a fabulous, striking, unforgettable read.

Existing in the same context of What You’re Getting Wrong About Appalachia and Appalachian Reckoning as an attempt to both understand the shifted political sands of place, and to assert a theory as to why, this book is an opportunity for people to deepen their understanding of rural people and politics. — Neema Avashia, author of Another Appalachia: Coming Up Queer and Indian in a Mountain Place

A direct look at the media narratives of politics. Ferrence wrestles with how he understands himself as an individual, a demographic, and then as Aristotle’s political animal. It is a fascinating look at the making of political and cultural tropes from the inside. — Edward Karshner, author of Writing the Self: A Phenomenological Approach to Composition Theory

Barn Gothic: Three Generations and the Death of the Family Dairy Farm Ryan Dennis (Island Press) $30.00 // OUR SALE PRICE = $24.00

I announced this a month ago and was glad a few people picked it up. Still, I hadn’t read it at that point and was just suggesting it looked good, and had good reviews. Many Hearts & Minds readers, I figured, would enjoy a memoir and collection of moving ruminations on life on the farm. It’s a beloved genre and I figured this seemed like a fun one to recommend.

But, man. What a book! I simply couldn’t put it down and I was moved, deeply moved, by some of the stories and the tragedies that befall this three generational family of Western New York dairy farmers. It’s not quite like the gentleman farm that Matthew Ferrence grew up on in Western Pennsylvania (his dad made his main living as a biology prof at the local university.) And he’s not writing with the humor and grace of my favorite farmer-writer, Michael Perry, although I bet Perry has read him already wondering why Dennis hasn’t made at least one joke about all the manure.

Ryan Dennis, though, is the really real deal. His dad and mom were hard-working dairy farmers and in the end of the 20th century into the 21st, these were very hard times. We learn just a bit about farm subsidies and milk quotas and the infamous insistence of Department of Agriculture head (under Nixon), Earl Butz, that farmers must “go big or go home.” As a few got bigger, smaller ones languished and, despite being encouraged by the likes of Louis Bromfield or Wendell Berry or the new agrarians, most farmers were in deep debt and facing often unjust pressure from banks. (M&T Bank has an ugly bit in Barn Gothic.) Barn Gothic is not often polemical, but the subtext of the farm crisis and the mess of agribusiness is there.

There are sweet and tender remembrances in this story, some of which feels like a short collection of readings or captivating essays. Always well written, the details of tractors and plows — most dairy farmers also grow their own silage for their herds, so while there is plenty of fun stuff about cows here, much of it is about farm implements and the many tools needed to repair them. The barns are filled with manure and other outbuildings are like garages and repair shops In the midst of the clutter and mooing, dad and son will tape together two big lids from teat-cleaning fluid and make hockey sticks and mess around, with the errant improvised puck flying into the flank of an unsuspected Holstein.

Most cows are pretty compliant with the milking and feeding, but there are always those that kick, and when a cow is dry (not making milk as she is pregnant) she can get cantankerous. It makes for some good drama.

The bigger drama of Barn Gothic, besides the hair-raising injuries and daily danger, is the question that appears half way through; will Ryan take over his grandpa’s farm, the one adjective to his own father and mothers. The two farms are, for odd reasons, tied together financially, and there is an occasional question about the health of the relationship between Ryan’s dad and his father (Ryan’s grandfather and family patriarch and good, old-school farmer.)  Ryan’s dad tries hard to be a better dad, and while singularly focused on his dairyman’s work, he’s at times fun and funny. I liked a lot of this; you will too,

“Even though Ryan grew up watching his father and grandfather struggle to survive, he always thought he would follow in their footsteps and take over the family farm. But as he milked cows and fed calves, the world outside the barn was changing. Between 2003 and 2020, forty thousand dairy farms went out of business in the United States.”

We know in the beginning of the book that Ryan has become a writer and is no longer running a family dairy farm. In the first page the two men are drinking gin on the porch and talking about the old days of the farm, the region, the milk industry, their lives. We learn that Ryan has become a writer drawn to telling rural stories and writing for literary journals that creatively tell of farm life. He is no longer a farmer and neither is his sister. Barn Gothic explains how they all got where they are. One reviewer calls it “deeply personal and unique.”  I call it a beautiful, profound elegy.

We owe a debt to the farmers who feed us — and to Dennis for this memoir.” — John Piotti, President, American Farmland Trust

 

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I could list oodles of others about rural life, about small towns, about domestic poverty and the church’s call to be involved in helping. Write to me if you need more ideas and I can sent a list. And then there is an increasingly good shelf of ministry in rural settings and small town pastoring.  Again, let us know if your interested!

For some reason, these five just seemed to be important to share now, to be read alongside or after the above three.

Disposable: American’s Contempt for the Underclass Sarah Jones (Avid Reader Press) $30.00 // OUR SALE PRICE = $24.00

This is brand new and I’ve read a quarter of it — what a book. Holy smokes. The first chapter is on an old phrase “social murder.” Do you know its origins? Jones is a senior writer at New York magazine (covering politics and, often religion even though she says she is an atheist.) Can the most predatory features of late modern capital even be constrained? Can we be honest about the inequality in our Mammon-driven culture?

She uses the disparities during COVID (including the horrific differences in death rates) as a way into this discussion, blending astute and up-to-date data and personal story, making this a vivid, passionate study. Beth Macy calls it “a masterful act of love.”

Disposable is a massive work of journalism–and a masterful act of love. Meticulously reported, voraciously researched, and poignantly rendered, Sarah Jones makes the blurry clear and the unseen visible. Both a scathing rebuke of corporate health care and a clear-eyed call to action, this book reminds us that we should not and cannot put the pandemic behind us. — Beth Macy, author of Dopesick and Paper Girl

Incisive . . . In the tradition of Barbara Ehrenreich, Jones combines interviews and firsthand observation of poverty with deeply researched history. . . . A full-throated, class-first critique of how the right-wing tendencies of American capitalism made the pandemic so devastating for the working poor. What Jones brings to this telling is an unflinching focus on American capital, its unholy marriage to the political class, and the way that union has eroded ordinary people’s faith in authorities. —The New Republic

White Poverty: How Exposing Myths About Race and Class Can Reconstruct American Democracy Reverend Dr. William J. Barber II with Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove (Liveright) $22.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $18.39

While this incredibly important work deserves a longer, more careful review, I hope you at least recall that we’ve featured it before, suggesting it with enthusiasm. Read it and make up your own mind if this is as compelling as I think it is. On the back is says it is “a generational work with far-ranging social and political implications White Poverty promises to be one of the most influential books in recent years.”

We can hope, but it has to be read and discussed, reviewed and shared, cited and used as a catalyst for deeper understanding and action. I think it is profound and could become influential.

I suppose you know of Reverend William Barber, the vibrant black pastor who founded Moral Mondays and is President of Repairers of the Breach. He is a spiritual leader calling us all to higher ground and righteous action. As Representative Jamie Raskin puts it, Barer “upholds the movement of interracial ‘moral fusion’ as the only way to pull America back from the complete economic and moral impoverishment of right-wing politics.” Black leader and scholar Eddie Glaude says it is “brimming with insight and prophetic fire.”

Poverty, By America Matthew Desmond (Crown) $20.00 // OUR SALE PRICE = $16.00

I needn’t say much about this. Desmond is famous for the award winning and exceptional study of homelessness called Evicted. Here he brings his stellar journalistic skills and research habits and reporting gifts to offer what dozens of outlets called one of the best books of 2020. Now in paperback, this book by the Pulitzer-Prize winning author is simply one that is — I the words of novelist and bookseller Ann Patchett — “essential and instructive, hopeful and enraging”

Yep. Like others on this list, the writing is vivid and hopeful, even, but first it is fierce and enraging. And informative. We’ve got to know the facts about poverty in these times and it does no-one any good to have a sentimental or judgmental or wrong-headed view of things. This book helps us see why the United States, even as the richest country on earth, still has more poverty than any other advanced democracy.

If you are serious about working on this topic, this is a must-read, learning to become what Demond calls a “poverty abolitionist.”

The Overlooked Americans: The Resilience of Our Rural Towns and What It Means for Our Country Elizabeth Currid-Halkett (Basic Books) $32.00 // OUR SALE PRICE = $25.60

I read this when it came out the summer of 2023 and wrote about it later that year. It was striking and enjoyable — I’ve been reading stuff about rural life and small towns for a long time — and while I do not recall what all I said about it, I’ll remind you now that it is important for a number of reasons. Currie Halkett is an honest sociologist and when COVID-19 hit, her research needed to be meticulously carried out by phone calls and Zoom. It may have somehow facilitated entering oddly deeper relationships as she came to know families from small towns all over the land, and she learned what sort of common values urban and rural folks share. The mix of qualitative research and quantitative is impressive. I noted that she was particularly open to talking with families about their religious faith and found it somehow plausible and even pleasant to include in her conversations topics of about faith and ultimate meaning.

As the publisher has put it, ”In The Overlooked Americans, public policy expert Elizabeth Currid-Halkett breaks through stereotypes about rural America. She traces how small towns are doing as well as, or better than, cities by many measures. She also shows how rural and urban Americans share core values, from opposing racism and upholding environmentalism to believing in democracy.”

One of the takeaways from this big book is that “when we focus too heavily on the far-right fringe, we overlook the millions of rural Americans” who are neither deplorable or fanatics, Some are, in fact, rather content with their lives.” Is this somehow in contradiction to the beautiful diatribe by the localist professor in Meadville, PA? Did she talk to injured and defeated farmers like the Dennis family in rural New York? Did she talk with anybody in Urbana, Ohio? I don’t know. It’s good data which points in a helpful direction and I recommend it. You’ve got to read Beth Macy first. Start with the powerful Paper Girl: A Memoir of Home and Family in a Fractured America.

The Wages of Peace: How to Confront Economic Inequality and Love Your Neighbor Well Brian Humphreys (Herald Press)$19.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $15.99

Obviously, each of the above titles would note that American problems, even with poverty and hunger, are more than economic. Reading Paper Girl you’ll be entertained reading quite a narrative, but you’ll be reminded about mental health issues and drug abuse, about people pulling their kids out of public schools and familial dysfunction. You’ll learn about work habits and faith and values and policy.

Still, deeply connected to the social inequalities and cultural problems of what the Sarah Jones book calls the “underclass” is the question of money. Economics. I hate to scare anybody away, but it is an often-talked about topic in the Bible and we’ve got scores of books that explore what Scriptures teach about poverty, injustice, and public justice. One simply cannot read theBible and remain disinterested in economics, as it is a key topic from Genesis to Revelation.

The Wages of Peace is just one relatively short and upbeat book tracing about how people of faith might confront economic injustice. With a foreword by Liz Theoharis (who wrote the weighty but vital Eerdmans volume, Always with Us? What Jesus Really Said about the Poor) you know this is substantive, theologically and in terms of Biblically-based passion. But it always has a certain level-headed hope, showing what can be done, how to proceed, offering stories to clarify and embolden.

With inflation and stagnant wages and so on, it’s hard for many to get by. Humphreys is a Mennonite so he is shaped deeply by the call to be peacemakers. It’s an operative image in The Wages of Peace (the title comes into a clearer light, eh?) and he invites us to be aspiring economic peacemakers. He invites us to “seek shalom in the marketplace and the neighborhood” and take up (as one chapter puts it) “Local Economic Peacemaking.” Socioeconomic stuff is admittedly complex so this book moves us towards talking well about money and profits and stewardship and sharing and wise public policy. Get it now to have on hand after you’ve read a few of the above titles.

The Wages of Peace is a rallying cry for the church to pursue true shalom by biblically reframing assumptions about wealth and work, by dismantling systemic barriers, and by activating economic equity for all, one living-wage job and empowered voice at a time. — Leonard Sweet, author, Jesus Human and Designer Jesus

 

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