This taught me how to make horseradish -- a very head-clearing experience! I also now know that I never want to make head cheese! ( )

I just love this one. Though this story occurs a couple of decades before my childhood in Iowa, I can certainly relate to some of the details in this book. Great book, well written. Makes me wish I could go back to a much simpler and happier time.

It was hard for me to believe this was written by a retired English professor. There was a lot of great Depression-era information in the book as well as some great anecdotes but I found that it dragged and was not very well arranged. ( )

I was really expecting this to be interesting. As it is, I would have given it two stars, except that I feel it has value as a social history. This is the sort of thing that would be a treasure for a family, and belongs in Iowan history collections. I don't really understand why it was published, let alone so well received. My opinion of of the New York Times's literary taste was not enhanced.

This is occasionally interesting, but at times fragments into a mishmash of scattered reminisces, and was at times so boring that only the fact that I was reading it for a book club kept me going. I also found the author's smug self-satisfaction off-putting. Does the frugal upbringing of which she so frequently boasts explain why she drove a basic, economical car like a Cadillac? Armstrong never does deal with the disconnect between her happy memories of the past, and the fact that she ran from that life as fast as she could. I often wondered as I read this if she is very disappointed in her children and grandchildren, as she tells us about her uplifting childhood that is so different from "kids today". Perhaps that explains a nostalgia for a life she didn't care to live as an adult. Otherwise, I guess she is just a nostalgia bore, like so many people, wanting to see a golden age in the past that apparently wasn't all that pleasant at the time. ( )

Little Heathens : Hard Times and High Spirits on an Iowa Farm during the Great Depression

For months, I passed the shelf at the book store on which this book sat. I mean, I picked it up occasionally, I read the blurb on the back, and then I would stare at the front as if waiting for a sign to buy it. Finally, I would set it back on the shelf from whence it came. It might look like a deliciously interesting piece of literature, but it had the distinct smell of a history book in disguise. Everyone knows the books of which I speak, the ones that lure you in with the promises of a rich and colorful glimpse at history and then turn out to be nothing more than a glorified textbook. Yeah those books. Well, I was determined not to have another one of “those books” polluting my bookshelf. So, I took a stand and refused to buy it, until the day I gave in and bought it. What can I say? I have an addiction.

Once the book was purchased reading it became my number one priority. After all, I wanted to prove to myself that no matter how seductive the book seemed to be, it was really a textbook knock off. I read the whole book front to back, and from it I drew two conclusions. Number one: I was absolutely right the book was a deliciously interesting piece of nonfiction literature. Number two: a little bit of simple goes a long, long way.

Mildred Armstrong Kalish, a retired English professor, is the person responsible for this well-written, vividly colorful account of the Great Depression. She writes from her own experience of being a child and growing up on a farm, an Iowa farm nonetheless, during the Great Depression. Talk about interesting, this book is a mind blower. Anyone who has ever wished that life was a little bit simpler, a little bit friendlier, or little bit more carefree needs to buy this book and read it.

Chapter by chapter, this book sucks you in and takes you back to times long passed and forgotten. This book will teach you how to catch a raccoon and turn it into a pet, tell you about customs that have long since died out, like the gifting and receiving of “May Baskets,” and even let you in on why there were two toilet seats in the outhouse instead of one. You’ll get directions on how to build a “Never-Fail” fire, how to get the most out of an egg, and how to get rid of a boil using a beet.

The book provides a small wealth of recipes for the home cook. I’ve made several of them and they have all been delicious. My favorite is the recipe for “Cabbage Salad,” although it is more like a coleslaw; I made it for New Years and everybody loved it. A couple examples of other recipes offered are Corn Oysters and Applesauce Cake.

The book provides more than a glimpse at what it was like to do laundry back then, the amount of work that went into keeping a farm, and how leisure time was spent by everyone from the children to the men. The book also provides a variety of common home remedies, from curing a cough to curing blood poisoning.

Each chapter of the book provides a window to a specific aspect of life during the Great Depression. Separated, the chapters are amazing, astounding, and delightful; together, they join seamlessly to provide an uplifting account of life during a difficult and trying time. The book is rich and colorful in its detail and story-telling yet still maintains its historical integrity. It is the perfect novel. If you could only read one novel this year, I would highly advise reading this one. This book will remain at the very top of my bookshelf forever. Happy Reading!! ( )

About the growing up on a farm in Iowa during the Depression (1930's). Very nostalgic and fun to read. ( )

Utterly charming, funny, and quite educational. I wish I could get my mom to write down her memories like this.

Plus, now when, my work seems stressful, I will just remember this book and be so, so, so thankful for how really easy I have it. ( )

I love local history and I really enjoyed this book. The author describes her childhood when she spent winters and springs in town with her grandparents to attend school and summers on the family farm. She goes into great detail about everyday life on the farm. As I read this, I was transported to my grandparents farm in rural Iowa and I certainly recognized their philosophy and mindset in Kalish's writing. Reading this book was like a glimpse into my own family. ( )

Iowa, farms, depression,

A semi-interesting account of a childhood on an Iowa farm during the late 1920's and 1930's. Filled with details, but not terribly well written. ( )

I thoroughly enjoyed listening to Ruth Ann Phimister read the audio version of this book. It was like listening to the author herself regale me with tales of her childhood. Little Heathens discloses everything you wanted to know about life in the 30s but your grandmother (or mother) didn't get around to telling you herself. I finally learned exactly how they managed to use the pages of the Sears catalog in the outhouse and the facts of life as gleaned from observance and eavesdropping, as no one spoke of such delicate matters back then. I also enjoyed reading about farm food and how they readied a chicken (and countless other items) for the dinner table. Mildred Kalish's gift for writing is like a time machine--it takes you back to rural Iowa in the 1930s with all its sights and sounds. A humorous and lively read. ( )

This is a good and enjoyable book. Compared to a book like "The Land Remembers", this book focuses a lot more on the social, cultural, historical, and family aspects of growing up on a farm in the 1930s. As an added bonus, there is a chapter full of farm-cooking recipes from that time. ( )

The author remembers her childhood growing up during the great depression in Iowa. However, the depression barely seems to be part of her memory. Moreso, the author accounts daily life in a light that bears little resemblance to a Stienbeck novel.

It was very interesting to read the accounts of a simpler time when it was so much more complicated to prepare a meal or wash the clothes. Some parts of this book I found myself skipping over, such as the recipes, although I might find myself returning to it another time. And other parts were great. I loved reading about the children's activities with animals from breaking in colts before the adults did to taking in baby racoons as pets. Other more disturbing animal stories involved the butchering of a turtle to make soup. I'm still a little disturbed by it, even though the kids were doing it for food. No one seems to really have gone hungry in the author's memory, however, unless the children were misbehaving and the adults sent them to bed without supper.

Parts of this book would be appropriate to read aloud to children to help them understand daily life during this time in history, but I would recommend reading before and carefully selecting passages to skip. Some parts will be very interesting while others will be very boring to listen to. The author does discuss human sexuality and childhood knowledge of it at the time.

When I was a child, we spent field trips learning about daily life in the old times, usually pre-civil war. I think it would be very interesting to see a museum that was dedicated to documenting daily life during the great depression.

detailed account

I enjoyed reading this book a lot. The author's style is engaging and the stories from her childhood are fascinating and at times funny and heartbreaking. I love reading books like this (it reminded me a bit of the Little House books) because so much of that way of life is gone now. It is a realistic glimpse into the hard work it took to run a household and feed and clothe a family in the 30s. Books like these make me feel grateful that I've grown up with electricity and indoor plumbing, but they also show me experiences that I never had, like sleeping on freshly washed and line-dried sheets, running barefoot through fields in spring, and participating in big family gatherings at cemeteries.I could have done with fewer recipes in the book (which I thought broke up the flow of the book and were annoying - they could have been included at the end if they had to be there). At times the author was pretty succinct about experiences where I would have liked some more elaboration. But overall, I really liked this book. ( )

Life on a farm and in a tiny town in Iowa in the 30's. Kalish is funny, straight-forward, and down-to-earth, the perfect person to tell us about her childhood, which was absolutely packed with work, from farmwork to housework. Somehow, the kids managed to have a huge amount of fun regardless - they were the "little heathens" of the title. My grandpa grew up on what might have been a similar farm - I think I understand him a little better now. Hugely entertaining read. ( )

Little Heathens is a near anthropological survey of life on a small family farm in Iowa during the 1930's, when there was no electricity, running water, bathrooms and very few if any "store bought" goods. It is today a world foreign in this age of convenience and Millie laments the loss of the "rich store of knowledge that had been bestowed on us by life on that simple farm," and the self-confidence and self-reliance it fostered. It's odd that this simple little memoir - nothing more than an elder grandparent retelling what life was like "when I was young" - has struck a chord with so many readers, it is one of the New York Times 10 most notable books of 2007. The Times attributes its success in part because so many memoirs today are about unsavory people doing scandalous things, it is a relief to read about a real person going about a "normal" life (if such a thing exists), someone you'd like to have as a relative or friend, or even to walk in her shoes (when she wore any). Partly it is Millie herself who is humble, sincere and likable.

But it is also, I believe, about bigger current day issues: Global Warming, Peak Oil, Recessions, high food prices and other man-made slow motion train wrecks have many questioning if society is on the right track and naturally many are looking back to the past for answers. A return to the country, simplicity, slow pace of life, the values of thrift, honor and tradition are finding wides audiences in modern forms, such as organics, slow food, alternative energy. They say when you reach a certain age "everything old is new again" and Millies account of the 1930s is finding a lot of interest in these times. It's a beautiful book of substance and simplicity, I recommend it highly.

--Review by Stephen Balbach, via CoolReading (c) 2008 cc-by-nd ( )

I don’t get it. Everyone loved this book—the New York Times Book Review named it one of the 10 best books of 2007. Really? There are chapters on frugality and outhouse pranks and nut gathering. Cold winters and back-breaking chores abound, but none of it held my interest. Despite the slimness of the volume, I struggled to finish. This memoir reads like an disjointed collection of encyclopedia entries pertaining to country life rather than a living, breathing experience.

This review also appears on my blog Literary License (short reviews, real opinions): litlicense.blogspot.com ( )

I didn't live it exactly, but heard my parents' lives so much, that I remember as if I did. ( )

A really cute story about a farm family growing up during the Depression era. Although it sounded like life was hard, the farm experience made for a really good lifestyle. The author also included receipes. ( )

http://kdegelau.blogspot.com/2007/07/... ( )

This is a memoir by a woman in her eighties concerning her childhood on a farm near Garrison, Benton County, Iowa. To anyone who had asimilar experience it is extremely poignant, and leaves on awash in memories, even though one's growing up was a boy rather than a girl. There are so many things discussed which recall those years in the 1930s and which leave on saying with Tennyson "And I would that my tongue could utter the thoughts that arise in me." This is the most exquisite return to nostalgia I have read recently, and is on a par with We Have All Gone Away, by Curtis Harnack (read 13 Dec 1980) in evoking one's Iowa childhood. Recommended without reservation.
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