Hollowing Out the Middle:  The Rural Brain Drain and What It Means for America.
Patrick J. Carr and Maria J. Kefalas.  Beacon Press. ISBN: 978-0-8070-4238-0

By Eric Melvin Reed, Nebraska College of Technical Agriculture

In order to research “Middle America,” Patrick J. Carr and Maria J. Kefalas moved to Iowa and conducted a case study of one town. “Ellis,” Iowa, faces many of the same problems as other small towns in rural America. Generations ago, when agriculture relied on big families and lots of workers, these towns flourished. Today, due to distinct changes in agriculture (namely the consolidation of farms, the implementation of new technologies, etc.), these towns are dying. Hollowing Out the Middle is not about economics. It’s about the consequences of rural America’s declining economy: Small town America is dying because young people are leaving-and they aren’t packing up and leaving just for jobs.
In Ellis, the authors observe four types of young people: “Achievers” (the brightest, most talented students who leave permanently for schools and opportunities in the cities), “seekers,” (the worldly types who leave in search of something beyond the countryside); “returners” (mostly disillusioned achievers and seekers); and “stayers” (youth who generally forego college, take blue collar jobs right out of high school, get married, and try their best to avoid serious problems). As sociologists, Carr and Kefalas resist the urge to stereotype, but as observers they remain distinct outsiders. No one will accuse them of falling in love with their subjects. Carr and Kefalas put forth the obligatory lines about the Heartland mattering, but the way they describe it, the nation might be better off without rural America: “To be sure,” Carr and Kefalas write, “Ellis is not the easiest place to be if you are a foreigner, gay, not Christian, not white, and obviously rich or poor” (14). However, the most disturbing trend in the book is the description of how implicit rural residents are in their own demise. They, more than anyone else, encourage their best and brightest to leave. Carr and Kefalas do offer some suggestions, but if the rural brain drain is to be fixed, rural Americans will want to solve many of their problems themselves.

Jeannette Walls. Half Broke Horses: A True-Life Novel.
Scribner. Oct. 2009. 272p. ISBN 978-1-4165-8628-9.

By Eric Melvin Reed, Nebraska College of Technical Agriculture

The term “true-life novel” sounds like an oxymoron. If a book-length story is true then it’s nonfiction; if it’s based on people and events from history but established in the imagination, it’s historical fiction. In Half Broke Horses, Jeanette Walls has written a genre-bending “true-life novel” of her grandmother, Lily Casey Smith. Born in a dugout on the “hard country” of west Texas and taught to break horses at an early age, Smith is raised to believe the most important lesson in life is learning how to fall.

Everything on the family homestead – from the flash floods to the tornados – supports Smith’s belief in a dangerous world. At the incredibly young age of five she finds herself running the ranch with her father, a philosopher and an eccentric with a temper. But with the ranch destined to be inherited by her younger brother, she feels pulled toward teaching and the city.

During a stint in Chicago, Smith is tricked into marrying a “crumb-bum” two-timing salesman. She returns to the Southwest, and there meets her second (and last) husband. Jim Smith is a man who matches his wife’s vitality and resourcefulness. The couple begin their life running a filling station on Route 66; before long they are managing a 100,000 acre ranch.
Half Broke Horses is about finding one’s “Purpose.” Good guys and bad guys proliferate the novel, but the eminent conflict is internal. Smith is a poker playing, gun carrying, survivor with a passion for flying airplanes; the peace and familiarity of the country never quite negate her fascination with technology and modernity.

A half broke horse of a different kind enters the novel in the form of Smith’s daughter. Rose Mary Smith (Walls’s mother) is a high-spirited beauty who refuses to accept her mother’s creeds about learning to fall and preparing for the worst. Reading Half Broke Horses, one senses the things that feel made up are probably the most true. The author has plucked some of the most salient moments of one person’s life joyous as well as tragic – and collected them into a series of first-person sequences that speak to others.