I really enjoyed reading this book. For many years I have been aware of the.changes in agricultural policy and practice that have changed how farmers and others provide the food that Americans eat. Recently, I have been watching a number of British television shows about the farming practices in that country, and find myself startled by how personal farming still is for even the even the largest farmers/suppliers there.

Grace Olmsted wrote this book partly as personal research to help her decide whether to move back to the rural place where she grew up. A major part of that investigation revolves around the research she does into the lives of her forebears and distant relations, and how the changing nature of agriculture has impacted their lives.

My politics are fairly aligned with those of the author; I think readers who disagree with her might not enjoy this book as much. However, all in all, I think it is a good way of personalizing a trend that has greatly altered the way food is grown and delivered in the US.

thanks to NetGalley and the publishers for providing me with an advanced reading copy.

Uprooted explores the authors trip back to revisit a town from her distant past that she remembers fondly. While there she interviews family and those that shaped the town, that shaped the person she has become.

We’re excited for this new book “Uprooted” by Grace Olmstead. We’re very much enjoying the review copy provided by #netgalley.

We know many of you like Wendell Berry, so this is right up your alley — all about finding value in a sense of place and “rootedness,” and how to preserve those values in a changing world. An incredibly thoughtful and enjoyable read.

You grow up. You leave the confines of home and hometown to make your way in the big world. You don’t come back. That narrative for success has permeated small town America for decades. And in her first book, Uprooted (due out on March 16th), Grace Olmstead demonstrates how we live out that story at our peril. Not just individually, as rootless people without deep ties to place, but as places themselves no longer sustain life. Olmstead shows readers the landscape of our loss. Soil robbed of nutrients by devastating monocrop farming, and ag land paved over by suburban sprawl. Once healthy towns whose thriving small businesses withered like ghosts. Communities that no longer have centers of activity, but become shopping strips and victims of suburban sprawl. And Olmstead also makes the pain personal, taking us to her hometown of Emmett, Idaho, profiling her family’s history there alongside others who loved and worked the land and were cornerstones of community life. Olmstead, like so many of us, left home, and with each visit back she’s confronted by irrefutable evidence of decline. Where some would only see disaster in the wake of agribusinesses’ insatiable hunger, Olmstead employs her journalistic training to find and profiles those who refuse to give up, documenting the small strides of tenacious farmers fighting to revitalize the land and community. By book’s end Olmstead contemplates what returning to her hometown. Would her presence have any positive impact, or is she better off “sticking” in Virginia, putting down roots and consciously become a contributor to community life there? There are no easy answers for Olmstead, or us. But no matter where you live, the questions are worth exploring in this provocative and engaging read. As Olmstead makes clear, agricultural policy, suburban sprawl, brain drain, and small town collapse impact our country and all of us personally—whether we knew it or not.

Jackson, MI. In “The Custom-House,” his prefatory essay to The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne wrestles with his generational roots in Salem. One of his ancestors, infamously, presided over the Salem witch trials here, and he now finds himself appointed to a government position at the Salem Custom House. But while Hawthorne concludes (wrongly, as it turns out) that he is destined to “make Salem my home,” he worries that this long family connection to the place is “an unhealthy one” and should be broken: “Human nature will not flourish, any more than a potato, if it be planted and replanted, for too long a series of generations, in the same worn-out soil. My children have had other birthplaces, and, so far as their fortunes may be within my control, shall strike their roots into unaccustomed earth.” This sentiment expresses an axiom in American, settler culture: the way to maximize individual opportunity and flourishing is to seek out richer soil. In an indication of the enduring power of this idea, Hawthorne’s resonant concluding phrase—his desire for his children to strike their roots into unaccustomed earth—forms the title for a rich collection of short stories by Jhumpa Lahiri about the lives of Indian immigrants seeking to plant themselves in unaccustomed American soil....

Full review will appear here: www.frontporchrepublic.com/tending-the-soil-of-our-homes-gracy-olmsteads-paean-to-roots

The topic of this book, as should be obvious from the title is about the phenomenon of being uprooted that a the ease with which movement of populations can occur is making more a reality of life for a large segment of society. Job availability, educational opportunity, or perhaps pure adventure-seeking desire propels people to leave their birth-place in search of a better place. While this is understandable and has had positive outcomes, such as a decrease in prejudice as one becomes familiar with varying people and begins to sense the oneness of mankind, it also has its own fair share of challenges which this book explores. It is a timely topic. I would recommend this book for anyone in search of home. For this reason,

Grace Olmstead grew up in Emmet, Idaho. Uprooted is her study of the different nuances of her home town and the ravages time, population loss, and policy have changed it. I related to this book on many levels. I come from a rural, farming background, and a small town. I hate that housing tracts have consumed so much good farm land across the country. I grew up amidst Midwestern prairie lands that are disdainfully referred to as flyover states, which enrages me. I liked the family history she shared. Her grandpa dad was salt of,the earth, like many people I grew up knowing. Their demise has left this world not for the better. I don’t agree with all of the author’s assertions or her tendency to pontificate on certain topics, but I do agree with her theme pertaining to the gifts a small town can bestow on those who originated from there. I have no desire to move back to my small town, but I appreciate it.

Uprooted is about rural farming communities and the challenges they face. Part-memoir and part-analysis it seeks to uncover what it means to be rooted in a place when our culture values mobility. Through the author, we learn about the history of Emmett and how it has grown and changed with the times. We get a well-written and interesting look into the Treasure Valley through the life of the author's own family and the other families that live and work there today. The book explores the nature of farming in America, the suburbanization of farmland, the boom and bust cycles of a small community, and the importance of connection and community. All the topics are addressed in a conversational and friendly tone and while researched (with footnotes) this is not a socio-economic treatise. It's an easy, thought-provoking, read that I want to share with others so we can talk about it.

In many ways the content of this book struck home. I was the teenager that wanted to get out of their podunk town and travel far away. I was the author, deciding to leave my Idaho valley for "bigger and better" only to find I didn't quite know what I was rejecting. I have friends who are farmers, ranchers, and dairymen that have struggled in recent years and shown me just how much farming is big business. I have watched as fields that I once worked in, hoeing beets as a kid, have been transformed into small subdivisions and seen those paved roads dead-ending into fields. This book captures so perfectly what I see around me in my valley (which is not the Treasure Valley) and it gave me a framework for thinking about the changes. I also loved how it gave me a bit of hope for these communities to find a middle way. Though the book gives no real answers I enjoyed all the questions and ways of thinking about the issues.

Finally, I want to say how much I appreciate this thoughtful and honest approach to Idaho's people and culture. After reading Educated earlier this year I have found myself annoyed that for so many people it has become their default when they think about my home state. I can't wait to recommend this as an alternative to every single person who asks me about Educated.

This debut seeks to give us an inside look into Emmett Idaho (the author's hometown) and what happens when people choose to leave or stay in a small farming community.

I was under the impression this would be a bit more of a memoir (a la J.D. Vance's Hillbilly Elegy) about a young woman grappling with her roots and a sense of connection or disconnection from the town she left behind for "greener pastures."

The topic of leaving one's hometown and community roots is a particularly poignant one as our entire millennial generation is extremely mobile across America compared to previous generations. I started out pretty excited about this one when she went to her old high school and asked students if they planned to stay and farm. But, her points about transience and brain drain didn't appear to be the main anecdote of the book which left me disappointed because that's what I was expecting and hoping to read.

I noted in the first few chapters that her writing style is fluid and easy to follow, but as the book progressed I found the text highly repetitive and over-wordy. I could probably pinpoint several locations where the same idea was repeated over, and over, and over again.

I think Olmstead tries to cover too much ground and this leaves the book feeling rootless. (See what I did there?) The points she makes are valid but there is almost so much happening in this book that different truths feel like outright contradictions. For example, she states many Americans have transience thrust upon them. Then the next sentence or paragraph she would say that Americans are far less mobile than they used to be. While these things may be inherently true, there is so much going on in the text that it had me questioning what the overall point was supposed to be.

Olmstead seems to almost question why the young are leaving town but then spends the rest of the book explaining about how nearly impossible it is for farmers to make it in our modern Big Ag/corporation-dominant economy. So... if people want to thrive and feel as though they can't accomplish this in their hometown why would anyone stay? Additionally, it comes across as slightly condescending to make the point that sometimes staying and growing roots is more beneficial than moving and achieving higher success/more money/etc. because that is exactly what the author herself has done in moving to Virginia.

Overall, not a bad book, but I feel like my strongest take away was that younger generations are leaving small farming communities for better opportunities, inevitably leaving a hole that can't be filled for those left behind.

I thought this was an interesting novel about small towns/farm towns and how a lot of them are dying out due to the fact people will leave and never come back to help work the land or stay and run businesses or raise their family there. I think Grace Olmstead did a great job researching for her novel and really ask good questions to farmers and other locals in her home town of Emmett, Idaho about why they still work the farms and didn't leave. I also like the questions she brought up about if these small towns or farming communities can survive and if young people will want to stick around their hometowns and not uproot to other places. After reading this book I kept thinking about it and now my mind is thinking about small towns and how I hope I don't see them die off. I also wrote down some of her refences so that I can read those books in the future.

The writing in this book is fine, but it seemed to need a bit more focus. The book seems like it will be a memoir about the writer deciding to go back home to live or not. Instead this is a very small part of the book. The book focused more on her grandparents history and the history of agriculture in Idaho. When the author is talking more about herself, she has a very preachy tone on how her generation has treated small towns and how that needs to be different. I feel like this could have been a better book if it had more focus on one topic or a better hand at mixing these topics together.