Publishers Weekly
04/06/2020
San Francisco author Mockett (Picking Bones from Ash) takes a road trip in the summer of 2017 to “flyover states” with a crew of wheat harvesters in this well-written but dense take on farming, race, and religion. Mockett embarked on the trip—which included stops in Idaho, Oklahoma, and Texas—at the invitation of a farmer named Eric, the head of a harvesting crew who for decades has cut the wheat on the Mockett family farm in Nebraska. He wanted Mockett, who was born and raised in California and spent her childhood summers on the farm, to see more of her country and meet its rural residents. Mockett, who is half Japanese, discusses being surrounded by whiteness on her trip and offers history lessons—on Native American displacement and the impact of the transcontinental railroad, among other topics—as she travels and meets farm workers, most of whom are churchgoing Christians who often engage in long conversations about the Bible. As for farming itself, Mockett explains that every year workers like Eric take a “harvesting route” across the middle of America with tractors and combines, and discusses the realities of crop production and of “organic” farming (“It is marketing,” Eric says. “Do not fall for it”). Filled with rich descriptions, this illuminating memoir wonderfully captures farming life in Middle America. (Apr.)
From the Publisher
Mockett, writing with a gentle self-consciousness, offers a compassionate portrait of conservative evangelicals, along with lucid musings on agricultural science, Native American history, and the quiet majesty of the Great Plains.”—The New Yorker
“A rich blend of science, philosophy and spirituality.”—Star Tribune (Minneapolis)
“[Marie Mutsuki Mockett] has the kind of deft touch with the English language that would make me read a book by her, no matter what it was about. . . . At the end of the trip, Mutsuki Mockett bemoans the fact that she wants her ‘old self to reappear’—but it won’t. The Midwest has changed her. That, perhaps, is her greatest talent: the willingness to examine, even abandon, her own biases before she casts stones. That’s a lesson in empathy that we can all learn from, in the time of coronavirus, in the time of presidential elections—and beyond.”—Financial Times
“[American Harvest is] by turns a woman’s travelogue of the Great Plains, a sweeping history of the American West, and a cross-sectional study of contemporary Christian theology.”—Bookforum
“A sprawling story of pilgrimage, spiritual and personal and cultural, and Mockett’s gaze is both penetrating and sweeping. . . . American Harvest is sure to wield authority in election-year conversations about what the place named in Mockett’s subtitle—heartland—signifies.”—The Christian Century
“Essential pandemic reading. . . . [American Harvest] strives not only to understand the most rural parts of the heartland, but to take a good hard look at the growing divide between rural America and its urban sisters.”—Book Riot
“[Marie Mutsuki Mockett] tell[s] a tale that is at times haunting, sometimes moving and always reported with a keen eye and open mind. This is one of the most important books of 2020.”—Inside Hook
“When she inherits the family farm, Mutsuki Mockett begins a journey into the center of America—its agrarian rhythms, its generosity, its enormous blindspots—and comes out the other side with the kind of perspective we need more of right now.”—Literary Hub
“Essential pandemic reading. . . . [American Harvest] strives not only to understand the most rural parts of the heartland, but to take a good hard look at the growing divide between rural America and its urban sisters.”—Book Riot
“Fascinating [and] well-written. . . . [Mutsuki Mockett’s] keen observations from a non-Christian perspective are gracious and illuminating.”—The Mennonite
“A revealing, richly textured portrait of the lives of those who put food on our tables.”—Kirkus Reviews
“Filled with rich descriptions, this illuminating memoir wonderfully captures farming life in Middle America.”—Publishers Weekly
“Books enable readers to broaden their lives, and this one—in which Marie Mutsuki Mockett joins a crew harvesting wheat—is a doozy, as Studs Terkel’s were. . . . I never knew a person on a wheat-harvesting crew, and now I do, thanks to Mockett’s vivid and true account.”—Annie Dillard
“A patient, radiant, kindly book that in its own way determinedly adds a brick to the shining city on the hill where Americans will understand each other.”—Francis Spufford
“Marie Mutsuki Mockett describes the American plains as having 'a subtle gradation in topography that suits a ruminating mind,' and the same can be said of her stunning new book. . . . Her insights are ones we could all stand to learn from right about now.”—John Jeremiah Sullivan
“In the best tradition of travel literature, American Harvest is a discursive odyssey, an exploration of self, others, faith, and a landscape of terrible beauty.”—Randall Balmer
“Traveling the West with a group of grain harvesters is a great idea for a book, and Mockett, the daughter of a Nebraska farm family, gives her whole self to it. . . . A beautiful and powerfully moving book.”—Ian Frazier
“Marie Mutsuki Mockett’s American Harvest is a book about this country unlike any other. Mockett’s account of the harvest is riveting, and the way she navigates her own plural identity as she travels with the combines is brilliant. This is a stunning, astonishing accomplishment.”—Susan Cheever
“An extraordinary feat of empathy set against a land of reds, whites, and blues, American Harvest doesn’t just speak to the great divide—it dares to bridge it.”—Marlon James
Library Journal
03/01/2020
In this latest work, Mockett (Where the Dead Pause, and the Japanese Say Goodbye) explores America's Great Plains as she journeys from Texas to Idaho with a crew of wheat harvesters. The author grew up traveling to her family's Nebraska wheat farm, but it wasn't until an invitation from a custom harvester and family friend that Mockett immerses herself in the complex sociopolitical history of the heartland. As a Japanese American woman with secular ideologies, it becomes quickly evident to Mockett that she is an outlier among a crew of mainly white men whose guiding principles are ruled by their evangelical Christian faith. These differences push the author to pose difficult questions regarding faith, the land, and what it means to be American in the Midwest. Readers will enjoy a narrative rich in historical context of colonization, land ownership, and farming that is expertly woven into chapters with searching theological dialog while describing picturesque landscapes of fields and skies. VERDICT A highly readable, multifaceted look into the topics of faith and living in America today. The level of intimacy within these pages invests readers not only in the unfolding human story but also in the history of the land. [See Prepub Alert, 9/30/19.]—Angela Forret, State Lib. of Iowa, Des Moines
Kirkus Reviews
2020-01-07
Literate travels in the forgotten American hinterlands.
Mockett (Where the Dead Pause, and the Japanese Say Goodbye, 2015, etc.) is a child of "the coasts: seventeen years in California, four years of college in New York City, more years of ping-ponging between the East and West Coasts," the kind of person likely to think of the territory in between as flyover country. Yet, with a Japanese mother and High Plains father, she knows that ground well, having spent summers on a family farm that spilled over from Nebraska into Colorado. The author returned to explore the work of itinerant contract or "custom" harvesters whose "routes across state lines were established by men, who handed down their itineraries to their sons, and harvesting became a family business." Traveling with one such family across the center of the country, Mockett analyzes the divides between rural and urban, religious and apathetic or atheistic, conservative and liberal. Even in her own family, she writes, those differences were profound, but what is a bicoastal, educated person to make of someone who believes "that man was around at the time of the dinosaur"? Refreshingly, the author finds that conversation is just the thing; with it, some stereotypes shade away or at least become more complicated, as with that young fundamentalist who also maintained that if someone is pro-life, "they would help children, not just abandon them." On the other hand, some farmers and harvesters spend their off time at the Omniplex, a sprawling science museum in Oklahoma City, and some hold education and the "uncharted world" in our minds in esteem while others hold the Bible to be the sole truth. What some city sophisticates dismiss as monoculture, many country people praise as progress. Throughout, Mockett's portrait is nuanced, revealing those overlooked people in counties likely to have voted for the sitting president to be worth paying attention to.
A revealing, richly textured portrait of the lives of those who put food on our tables.
