Uprooted: Recovering the Legacy of the Places We've Left Behind

by Grace Olmstead Narrated by Grace Olmstead

Overview

"A superior exploration of the consequences of the hollowing out of our agricultural heartlands."-Kirkus Reviews

In the tradition of Wendell Berry, a young writer wrestles with what we owe the places we've left behind. 
 
In the tiny farm town of Emmett, Idaho, there are two kinds of people: those who leave and those who stay. Those who leave go in search of greener pastures, better jobs, and college. Those who stay are left to contend with thinning communities, punishing government farm policy, and environmental decay.
 
Grace Olmstead, now a journalist in Washington, DC, is one who left, and in Uprooted, she examines the heartbreaking consequences of uprooting-for Emmett, and for the greater heartland America. Part memoir, part journalistic investigation, Uprooted wrestles with the questions of what we owe the places we come from and what we are willing to sacrifice for profit and progress.
 
As part of her own quest to decide whether or not to return to her roots, Olmstead revisits the stories of those who, like her great-grandparents and grandparents, made Emmett a strong community and her childhood idyllic. She looks at the stark realities of farming life today, identifying the government policies and big agriculture practices that make it almost impossible for such towns to survive. And she explores the ranks of Emmett's newcomers and what growth means for the area's farming tradition.
 
Avoiding both sentimental devotion to the past and blind faith in progress, Olmstead uncovers ways modern life attacks all of our roots, both metaphorical and literal. She brings readers face to face with the damage and brain drain left in the wake of our pursuit of self-improvement, economic opportunity, and so-called growth. Ultimately, she comes to an uneasy conclusion for herself: one can cultivate habits and practices that promote rootedness wherever one may be, but: some things, once lost, cannot be recovered.

Editorial Reviews

From the Publisher

Olmstead does the important work of examining perhaps the most overlooked aspect of American identity: place. For those privileged enough to choose where they make their home, she suggests a value set beyond cultural prestige and financial conquest—belonging, commitment, stewardship. Uprooted offers our fractured society a path toward wholeness.” —SARAH SMARSH, author of Heartland

“Many rural young Americans face a conundrum—should they stay true to their roots and lose out on a big career, or leave behind those they love to try to make a difference in the world? Olmstead handles this problem beautifully and honestly, highlighting its urgency, all while avoiding easy answers.” —CHRIS ARNADE, author of Dignity

“Uprooted helps us understand what is lost when people lose their connections to particular lands and communities. It also helps us appreciate what is gained by a patient and enduring commitment to nurture the places and people that nurture us. Reading Olmstead’s book confirms that the need for roots is one of humanity’s universal and essential needs.” —NORMAN WIRZBA, Gilbert T. Rowe Distinguished Professor of Christian Theology at Duke University Divinity School

"Through stories of her loved ones and inspiring profiles of figures in her home state of Idaho, Gracie Olmstead shows that real farming doesn't take place in a factory. It's done in a community. Returning to these roots is one of the most bipartisan issues out there."—AUSTIN FRERICK, Deputy Director of the Thurman Arnold Project at Yale University

Library Journal

03/05/2021

Olmstead treats with gratitude and respect the "rootedness" she felt growing up in Emmett, ID. She asserts that her great-grandfather and others white Idahoans of his generation felt deep satisfaction with the lives they chose and their enduring bonds to the land and to their communities. Those who leave Idaho, or their own home states, she warns, need to reckon with what they are losing by leaving. A journalist now living outside Washington, DC, she concludes that, despite her fear, a person can find a tight-knit community even as a newcomer in a densely populated suburb on the other side of the country. Still, she plans to return to Emmett with her children to renew family ties and care for her parents. Olmstead doesn't always make a convincing case either way; the book's chapters alternate between reflections on her childhood and her desire to move back home, and her ruminations result in sometimes uneven writing. She describes Idaho as homogeneous, and she doesn't engage with the idea that the experiences of Black, Asian, and Indigenous Idahoans might suggest a need for more change and less rootedness among white residents of the state. VERDICT While Olmstead successfully creates a full portrait of her family, especially her grandpa, her calls to rediscover the land fall a little short.—Cynthia Harrison, George Washington Univ., Washington, DC

Kirkus Reviews

2020-12-31
A Washington, D.C.–based journalist returns to her Idaho birthplace and muses about its decline.

Permanently settled in the 1860s by a mixture of homesteaders, miners, and loggers, Emmett grew into a prosperous farming town. It also became almost entirely White because that’s what settlers wanted. “The history of Emmett…is rife with horrific stories of murder and abuse of local Native Americans,” writes Olmstead, and Idaho laws forbidding Asian land ownership stayed on the books until 1952. Along with local history, the author offers a skillful mixture of memoir, polemic (in the vein of Michael Pollan), and paean for rural communities (à la Wendell Berry, cited often). She paints a simultaneously vivid and discouraging picture of the consequences of a profit-hungry economic system in which “mobility is equated with success and rootedness with failure.” Even as she matured in a loving family and close-knit community, Olmstead faced consistent pressure to leave. The ruthless combination of the free market and government policy was converting family farms into megafarms focused only on “profit-focused ends.” In the 1980s, farmers earned 37 cents from every dollar Americans spent on food; today, it’s 15 cents and dropping. As an industrial product, food increasingly became an input for other industrial products. Perhaps the author’s greatest shock was discovering Emmett’s dependence on supermarkets, which carry few local goods. Surrounding farms once provided much of their food, but no more. One Virginia farmer told Olmstead that “farming is seen as what you do if you can’t do anything else.” The author also describes an organic farm, a workaholic entrepreneur expanding his produce farm, and a couple who left the city to restore a family farm. While these stories reflect optimism, much of Olmstead’s urgent narrative, a kindred spirit to Marie Mutsuki Mockett’s American Harvest, suggests that too much has been lost already.

A superior exploration of the consequences of the hollowing out of our agricultural heartlands.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940176997736
Publisher:	Penguin Random House
Publication date:	03/16/2021
Edition description:	Unabridged

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