"Tara Westover was seventeen the first time she set foot in a classroom. Born to survivalists in the mountains of Idaho, she prepared for the end of the world by stockpiling home-canned peaches and sleeping with her "head-for-the-hills bag." In the summer she stewed herbs for her mother, a midwife and healer, and in the winter she salvaged in her father's junkyard. The family was so isolated from mainstream society that there was no one to ensure...

The teenage son of an Appalachian single mother who dies when he is eleven uses his good looks, wit, and instincts to survive foster care, child labor, addiction, disastrous loves, and crushing losses.

President Jimmy Carter has become an acclaimed, best-selling author since his days in the White House. In An Hour Before Daylight, he offers poignant remembrances of his childhood days in Depression-era rural Georgia. With eloquent yet conversational prose, Carter recalls the events and people who shaped his life from his earliest days. He describes the sharecropping economy of the 1930s, where hard farm labor was done by hand and those who worked...

"For most of America's history, rural people and culture have been casually mocked, stereotyped, and, in general, deeply misunderstood. Now an array of short stories, poetry, graphic short stories, and personal essays, along with anecdotes from the authors' real lives, dives deep into the complexity and diversity of rural America and the people who call it home. Fifteen extraordinary authors--diverse in ethnic background, sexual orientation, geographic...

Mildred Armstrong Kalish's Little Heathens is a compelling memoir of her hardscrabble life on an Iowa farm during the 1930s. With no electricity or indoor plumbing and with little heat or money on the farm, Mildred learns to find joy in the priceless blessings of life.

Relates how an enterprising teenager in Malawi builds a windmill from scraps he finds around his village and brings electricity, and a future, to his family.

A bold debut novel weaves a coming-of-age story into the gritty lives and desolate beauty of Vermont's northeast kingdom.

Inheriting her father's 7,000 acre wheat farm in the panhandle of Nebraska, the author accompanies a group of evangelical Christian wheat harvesters through the heartland, peeling back layers of the American story, the politics of food and the culture of the Great Plains.