Mildred Armstrong Kalish. (2007). Little Heathens: Hard Times and High Spirits on an Iowa Farm During the Great Depression. Random House Publishing Group.

Mildred Armstrong Kalish. 2007. Little Heathens: Hard Times and High Spirits On an Iowa Farm During the Great Depression. Random House Publishing Group.

Mildred Armstrong Kalish, Little Heathens: Hard Times and High Spirits On an Iowa Farm During the Great Depression. Random House Publishing Group, 2007.

Mildred Armstrong Kalish. Little Heathens: Hard Times and High Spirits On an Iowa Farm During the Great Depression. Random House Publishing Group, 2007.

OverDrive Product Record

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Little Heathens

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Hard Times and High Spirits on an Iowa Farm During the Great Depression

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1. • value: Recipes
2. • value: family
3. • value: relationships
4. • value: rural life
5. • value: Biography
6. • value: Food
7. • value: Great Depression
8. • value: Historical
9. • value: Farm life
10. • value: Iowa
11. • value: parenting
12. • value: culture
13. • value: BIOS
14. • value: society
15. • value: non-fiction
16. • value: autobiographies
17. • value: Farming
18. • value: american history
19. • value: Social Studies
20. • value: Autobiography
21. • value: Memoirs
22. • value: Midwest
23. • value: Social History
24. • value: true story
25. • value: Inspirational
26. • value: inspiration
27. • value: 1930s
28. • value: biographies
29. • value: History
30. • value: cultural history
31. • value: narrative nonfiction
32. • value: depression
33. • value: memoir
34. • value: True stories
35. • value: Biographical
36. • value: farm
37. • value: depression era
38. • value: biographies and memoirs
39. • value: nonfiction books
40. • value: history books
41. • value: History book
42. • value: great depression books

creators

1. • role: Author
   • fileAs: Kalish, Mildred Armstrong
   • bioText: Mildred Kalish, the author of Little Heathens, was a retired professor of English who grew up in Garrison, Iowa, and taught at several colleges, including the University of Iowa, Adelphi University, and Suffolk Community College. She was awarded Best Emerging Author at the Iowa Authors Award and received an honorary doctorate in Humane Letters from her alma mater, the University of Iowa. Mildred Kalish died in 2023.
   • name: Mildred Armstrong Kalish

imprint

Bantam

publishDate

2007-05-29T00:00:00-04:00

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title

Little Heathens

fullDescription

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.”

reviews

1. • premium: False
   • source: New York Times Book Review
   • content: "Not only trustworthy and useful, but also polished by real, rare happiness. It is a very good book, indeed. In fact, it's averyveryverygoodbook."
2. • premium: False
   • source: Elizabeth Gilbert, The New York Times Book Review
   • content: "Not only trustworthy and useful, but also polished by real, rare happiness. It is a very good book, indeed. In fact, it's averyveryverygoodbook."
3. • premium: False
   • source: Cleveland Plain Dealer
   • content: "Little Heathens made me ache for my own Depression-era Grandma, with her hand-cranked clothes wringer and her North Dakotan speech tut-tutting.... This is a book to awaken your family's own half-remembered stories - or better, to send you back to your elders to scour up your own."
4. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     May 28, 2007
     Kalish's memoir of her Iowa childhood, set against the backdrop of the Depression, captures a vanished way of traditional living and a specific moment in American history in a story both illuminating and memorable. Kalish lived with her siblings, mother and grandparents-seven in all-both in a town home and, in warmer weather, out on a farm. The lifestyle was frugal in the extreme: "The only things my grandparents spent money on were tea, coffee, sugar, salt, white flour, cloth and kerosene." But in spite of the austere conditions, Kalish's memories are mostly happy ones: keeping the farm and home going, caring for animals, cooking elaborate multi-course meals and washing the large family's laundry once a week, by hand. Here, too, are stories of gossiping in the kitchen, digging a hole to China with the "Big Kids" and making head cheese at butchering time. Kalish skillfully rises above bitterness and sentiment, giving her memoir a clear-eyed narrative voice that puts to fine use a lifetime of careful observation: "Observing the abundance of life around us was just so naturally a part of our days on the farm that it became a habit." Simple, detailed and honest, this is a refreshing and informative read for anyone interested in the struggles of average Americans in the thick of the Great Depression.

5. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     May 7, 2007
     Kalish's memoir of her Iowa childhood, set against the backdrop of the Depression, captures a vanished way of traditional living and a specific moment in American history in a story both illuminating and memorable. Kalish lived with her siblings, mother and grandparents-seven in all-both in a town home and, in warmer weather, out on a farm. The lifestyle was frugal in the extreme: "The only things my grandparents spent money on were tea, coffee, sugar, salt, white flour, cloth and kerosene." But in spite of the austere conditions, Kalish's memories are mostly happy ones: keeping the farm and home going, caring for animals, cooking elaborate multi-course meals and washing the large family's laundry once a week, by hand. Here, too, are stories of gossiping in the kitchen, digging a hole to China with the "Big Kids" and making head cheese at butchering time. Kalish skillfully rises above bitterness and sentiment, giving her memoir a clear-eyed narrative voice that puts to fine use a lifetime of careful observation: "Observing the abundance of life around us was just so naturally a part of our days on the farm that it became a habit." Simple, detailed and honest, this is a refreshing and informative read for anyone interested in the struggles of average Americans in the thick of the Great Depression.

     Copyright 2007 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

popularity

263

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4. • value: Nonfiction

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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...

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awards

1. • source: The New York Times
   • value: 10 Best Books of 2007

subtitle

Hard Times and High Spirits on an Iowa Farm During the Great Depression

publisher

Random House Publishing Group

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   • description: BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Memoirs
2. • code: FAM022000
   • description: Family & Relationships / Parenting / Grandparenting
3. • code: HIS036060
   • description: History / United States / 20th Century