Picking Bones from Ash by Marie Mutsuki Mockett

That, perhaps, is her greatest talent: the willingness to examine, even abandon, her own biases before she casts stones. At the end of the trip, Mutsuki Mockett bemoans the fact that she wants her 'old self to reappear'-but it won't. '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) ' 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. With exquisite lyricism and humanity, this astonishing book attempts to reconcile competing versions of our national story. American Harvest is an extraordinary evocation of the land and a thoughtful exploration of ingrained beliefs, from evangelical skepticism of evolution to cosmopolitan assumptions about food production and farming. She joins the crew in the fields, attends church, and struggles to adapt to the rhythms of rural life, all the while continually reminded of her own status as a person who signals 'not white,' but who people she encounters can't quite categorize. As Mockett follows Wolgemuth's crew on the trail of ripening wheat from Texas to Idaho, they contemplate what Wolgemuth refers to as 'the divide,' inadvertently peeling back layers of the American story to expose its contradictions and unhealed wounds.

In American Harvest, Mockett accompanies a group of evangelical Christian wheat harvesters through the heartland at the invitation of Eric Wolgemuth, the conservative farmer who has cut her family's fields for decades.

Mockett, who grew up in bohemian Carmel, California, with her father and her Japanese mother, knew little about farming when she inherited this land. About the Book ' story of the American wheat harvest, the politics of food, and the culture of the Great Plains'-Īn epic story of the American wheat harvest, the politics of food, and the culture of the Great Plains For over one hundred years, the Mockett family has owned a seven-thousand-acre wheat farm in the panhandle of Nebraska, where Marie Mutsuki Mockett's father was raised.

Picking Bones from Ash by Marie Mutsuki Mockett